Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[Tom Odom]

While not directly on topic your comment brought back to me two items that have intrigued me concerning cultural understanding in an expeditionary environment. A SF officer told me that his group sent members to an Indian reservation to do humanitarian / construction missions - several Australian officers told me of a similar program where they sent Army officers and enlisted to Aborigine reservations to do the same. The thought process here was they would never be able to train for all the possible cultures they might encounter in the future – but they were firm in their belief that it was the “mindset” that was important – once you live in and learn one other culture it is easier to adapt and operate in additional cultures down the road. Basically - one was more open-minded concerning cultural understanding. They also commented that certain personalities amongst the service-members were more conducive to accepting other cultures… Wish I knew more about this but both instances were relayed to me in passing…

Dave,

That is the central core of cultural understanding--the mindset. That's why I harp on 2 base rules---you have to have the mindset. Even the best linguist in the world is useless and may in fact be harmful without that mental framework. I have talked this issue with SF and FAOs and others; I believe the selection process has to include some form of adaptabilty measurement.

Where I have faulted the Dept of State in the past is their "adaptability" measures are really focused on how adaptable applicants are to a European/US centric environment centered on class structures and associated definitions of what constitutes "higher culture." In many ways the OSS and then the CIA followed the same path in selection and recruitment with he major exception that the OSS/CIA has always been willing to head hunt among the military, especially for covert operations.

Again Dave, you got it!

Tom

[Jimbo]

I hated my English classes at West Point. I still cringe when I hear Walzer mentioned.

[George L. Singleton]

I hated my English classes at West Point. I still cringe when I hear Walzer mentioned.

Let us be careful as I have a young daughter, just complete two degrees at Vanderbilt, BS in English Lit, MEd in English Lit, now teaching 10th grade English Lit in a Williamson Co, TN high school. She did a 6 month overseas semester at U. of Edinburgh, as well, focused on Shakespeare.

Make English Lit your friend and you will discover it is actually both history and historical fiction. I was a history major myself in undergrad school.

Cheers

[George L. Singleton]

Dave,

That is the central core of cultural understanding--the mindset. That's why I harp on 2 base rules---you have to have the mindset. Even the best linguist in the world is useless and may in fact be harmful without that mental framework. I have talked this issue with SF and FAOs and others; I believe the selection process has to include some form of adaptabilty measurement.

Where I have faulted the Dept of State in the past is their "adaptability" measures are really focused on how adaptable applicants are to a European/US centric environment centered on class structures and associated definitions of what constitutes "higher culture." In many ways the OSS and then the CIA followed the same path in selection and recruitment with he major exception that the OSS/CIA has always been willing to head hunt among the military, especially for covert operations.

Again Dave, you got it!

Tom

With the several overseas Muslims I have had establish e-mail correspondence with me since my numerous overseas letters to ed in the Karachi DAWN; the Peshawar FRONTIER POST; THE TIMES OF INDIA; MOSCOW TIMES, etc., etc., folks such as a key JKLF youthful booster out of Bedford, England of Indian subcontinent parents but himself born in England; the retired Pak Foreign Office senior official who is the grandson of the 2X prior King of Afghansitan, etc., etc. it is the damned "mindset" and "tribal loyalty and mindset/association" coupled with whatever branch or version of Islam they subscribe to, Sunni, Shiia, lesser sect, etc. that overrules and will not, ever, deal with rational thought!!!! This whole area of the world is as bad now as it was in my day, difference being we have no "in common" enemy the way we did during the Cold War with USSR and Communism.

This is the issue and the problem now. Lack of a larger common enemy that "makes them and us" be allies, liking it or not, so to speak.

George Singleton

[marct]

Hi Tom,

That is the central core of cultural understanding--the mindset. That's why I harp on 2 base rules---you have to have the mindset. Even the best linguist in the world is useless and may in fact be harmful without that mental framework. I have talked this issue with SF and FAOs and others; I believe the selection process has to include some form of adaptabilty measurement.

Well, the process that we (Anthropologists) use is fairly well documented - I touch on it in that article of mine in vol. 7 of SWJ. You can train for that mindset since it is pretty rare in most cultures, but the training, at least as we do it, can have some fairly unexpected consequences.

Tom, your point about linguists is well taken. Sapirs' discussion of the relationship between Language, Culture and Personality is well worth looking at in that regard. Without the flexible mindset, any translations will be transliterations which loose a lot of the actual meaning. BTW, another good book to add to the list in this area is Edward T. Hall's The Silent Language. It deals with proxemics - basically body language and how that is used in different cultures to shift meaning.

On the issue of adaptability training, I've often felt that the best "training" I ever got for doing fieldwork wasn't from school, but through training in improvisational acting. One of my friends in the theatre community used to train RCMP people for undercover work, and he would run them through improv training and then plop them down in a city with no money, luggage or ID, except for an emergency coin to make a phone call (if they used it, they failed). They had to report back to a particular location after 72 hours, at which point they would be debriefed and scored. The only person who ever scored 100% walked in wearing a $1000 suit, with another $6000 worth of luggage and a lot of cash.

Where I have faulted the Dept of State in the past is their "adaptability" measures are really focused on how adaptable applicants are to a European/US centric environment centered on class structures and associated definitions of what constitutes "higher culture." In many ways the OSS and then the CIA followed the same path in selection and recruitment with he major exception that the OSS/CIA has always been willing to head hunt among the military, especially for covert operations.

Well, it does make sense for State to focus on that - think about Heinlein's "Pie with a fork" story. What has always amazed (amused) me is that they concentrate on the surface of "high culture" without going deeper. They, and other foreign service groups, are actually trying to train people in a pseudo-aristocratic mindset from the late 19th century. I used to find this absolutely hilarious, since it was so obviously merely a surface understanding of that particular sub-culture.

Marc

[Tom Odom]

They, and other foreign service groups, are actually trying to train people in a pseudo-aristocratic mindset from the late 19th century.

That is exactly my point. The good ones--the good State folks and I worked with some of the best--slip this mental punch and adapt. Others do not; the Kinshasa crowd Stan and I endured with 2 exceptions fit this model.

And I will also say we face the same type of mental imprinting when we are coming up through the system. In relation to this discussion, the gap between the conventional and unconventional is difficult to bridge.

best

Tom

[slapout9]

Special Forces and American Indians. I found this link with a short description. It was called SPARTAN- Special Proficiency at Rugged Training and Nation Building!!!! They worked with Indian tribes in Florida,Arizona,Montana. Built roads and gave minor mediacl care. The program went out of action in the early 80's bet they wished they had kept it now. Below is the link.

http://www.101st.org/RB6/mainSF8.html

[Bill Moore]

We seem to equate degrees with intellectuals, and while there is an obvious correlation, I'm not a believer that it is the degree or the IQ score, but rather a person who desires to learn (thus the correlation), is curious about how things really work, always questions the accepted truth, and can truely think outside the box (of course Albert comes to mind) when it comes to solving complex problems whether is designing alternative energy forms, space travel, advanced psychological/sociological concepts, string theory, etc.

Is the military culturally anti-intellectual? Our schools of higher learning (though I think it is changing) teach conformity. We train our officers to embrace doctrine, which means we describe problems based on our doctrinal solutions, instead of really getting at the heart of the matter, which is determining what the actual problem, then designing an appropriate solution (which may not be doctrinal). You look at John Boyd, he came out of left field, and was rejected by many senior officers, while the ever changing Marines embraced him (at least some young Turks in their ranks).

The military isn't only institution to resist change, or in present day lexicon, resist becoming a learning organization. The Academic community at large appears to have blindly embraced an extreme left ideology, like folks in Southern Alabama for the most part blindly embrace Christianity.

Perhaps intellectualism is a combination of intellect, education, and moral courage to break with the ranks? If we're in an organization that encourages conformity, where does the intellectual fit? Do we need intellectuals at the grass roots (the so called strategic corporals)? It is better to have a guy on your left that will follow the SOP, thus be predictable in the unpredictable world of combat? Do we want our general officers to be intellectuals (many are), or guys with a lot of muddy boots experience who learned common sense in the school of hard knocks coming up through the ranks?

I don't know how you design an organization that welcomes both, so you can synergize their unique strengths. Clearly we need intellectual leadership to help design an overall strategy for our war on terrorism, instead of the narrow minded, anti-intellectual, find, capture/kill approach we're using now. We also need experienced warriors to lead the troops in the execution of this strategy. The intellectual can remain aloof, he needs to hear what the guys on the ground are saying, and adapt, and vice versa. Very easy to conceptualize all of this, but it another thing to put it into practice.

[Tom Odom]

Who was the second ?

Hey mate,

I was thinking of Peter Whaley as the POL section rebel--and yes Peter did have a large bag of personal quirks to match his many bow ties, I fact I confirmed in living with him in Kigali for a year. One of the funniest things I ever saw or participated in was trying to teach Peter to shoot a pellet rifle. he had been back in the States on leave when a flock of several thousands of fruit bats infested our trees. These bats do not sleep all day; they scream and fight and crap constantly. One side of our house was turning white. I called Peter and asked him to buy a pump up pellet rifle, .22 Cal. He went to a sporting goods store and they sold him a .20 sheridan with .22 pellets. Peter came back on a Friday and Saturday we declared war on the bats. You could get a .22 pellet into the .20 rifle if you slammed the bolt home. After about 5 shots that got painful. Anyway Peter had never fired a gun of any knd in his life; he was lousy at first but he improved with beer and experience. That afternoon Ambassador Rawson came by to give us the initial reports on Kibeho; David was surprised to see Peter still wearing pajamas and a silk robe in the back yard with a beer in one hand and a rifle in the other. By the end of the day we had about 500 bats down. The flock departed never to return. That afternoon into evening Kibeho turned very bloody.

The other K-town embassy guy who was ok was the senior econ officer--at least he actually came and discussed things.

Estonia is way too cold for me...

[marct]

Hi Bill,

Perhaps intellectualism is a combination of intellect, education, and moral courage to break with the ranks?

I've tended to use three different words to describe many of my colleagues,
both academic and non-academic: intellectual, scholar and theologian. My definition of "intellectual" is very similar to yours, but I substitute "a large database" for education. You can get that from education, but you can also get it from private study, life experience, etc.

I tend to use the term "scholar" to refer to someone who is a highly focused intellectual - a personality trait where they want the "best" representation of whatever they are looking at rather than a "satisfactory" representation (which most intellectuals will accept).

I use the term "theologian" to refer to an intellectual who relies on a pre-existing model of reality or interpretive framework. They can be bright, scholarly and will usually fall apart if their axiomatic assumptions about reality prove to be wrong.

If we're in an organization that encourages conformity, where does the intellectual fit? Do we need intellectuals at the grass roots (the so called strategic corporals)? It is better to have a guy on your left that will follow the SOP, thus be predictable in the unpredictable world of combat? Do we want our general officers to be intellectuals (many are), or guys with a lot of muddy boots experience who learned common sense in the school of hard knocks coming up through the ranks?

In a lot of ways, it may be better to turn this question on its head and ask "given the tasks individuals in the organization are required to perform, what mindset would be best?".

I don't know how you design an organization that welcomes both, so you can synergize their unique strengths. Clearly we need intellectual leadership to help design an overall strategy for our war on terrorism, instead of the narrow minded, anti-intellectual, find, capture/kill approach we're using now. We also need experienced warriors to lead the troops in the execution of this strategy. The intellectual can remain aloof, he needs to hear what the guys on the ground are saying, and adapt, and vice versa. Very easy to conceptualize all of this, but it another thing to put it into practice.

This is one of the classic problems in organizational theory. There are ways to do it, the KLM reforms of the late 1970's come to mind, but that requires some very strong leadership from the top. As of about 2004, almost 75% of corporate change management initiatives in North America failed; mostly from a lack of leadership, inadequate internal communications, and a generally poor understanding of culture.

If we look at the US military right now, we can already see signs of a bottom-up change happening but, until there are major adjustments in the career paths of officers (and that's only one of the problems), this probably will not result in an overall change - it's a "surge no a strategy" .

I think that one of the other, key problems,along with officer career paths, is the axiomatic assumptions behind the organization. Being the greatest conventional army, read organized along Industrial Age patterns, doesn't really do you much good when you are fighting an Information Age war. The long discussions elsewhere on IO/PSYOPs are a good example of this problem.

Marc

[wm]

Marct,

I like the three distinctions you make, but, being a follower of Plato's epistemology, I would add a 4th. Thus, folks fall into the four varieties of "knowing" that Plato's Socrates describes in his allegory of the Cave and his metaphor of the divided line (The Republic, Book VII) See my comments below in that regard.

My definition of "intellectual" is very similar to yours, but I substitute "a large database" for education. You can get that from education, but you can also get it from private study, life experience, etc.

This is what I would call someone with knowledge--episteme in Plato's Greek.

I tend to use the term "scholar" to refer to someone who is a highly focused intellectual - a personality trait where they want the "best" representation of whatever they are looking at rather than a "satisfactory" representation (which most intellectuals will accept).

This is what I would call someone with expert knowledge (Greek nous, when I am being charitable. When being uncharitable, I call this person a purist.

I use the term "theologian" to refer to an intellectual who relies on a pre-existing model of reality or interpretive framework. They can be bright, scholarly and will usually fall apart if their axiomatic assumptions about reality prove to be wrong.

I would subdivide this category (Greek doxa into "believers" and "true believers." The former have some rational basis for their axiomatic structures; the latter's axioms are just "God-given truths" not otherwise subject to much real reflection.

With all that being said, at some fundamental level we are all theologians. What becomes the real differentiator is how aware we are about the beliefs and assumptions that undergird all of the rest of our so-called knowledge. I think Bill Moore had some interesting insights in a post entitled PSYOP in the real world . . ." under the Losing the PSYOP War Thread in the subsection of OIF entitled The Information War.

Much of what Bill says echos what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say in On Certainty. LW noted that we don't determine truth by hearing the same thing over and over again. If that is all that truth required, then we could just reread multiple copies of the same newspaper story--which is basically what Bill was alluding to in his post about on-line info groups. The truely ironic thing is that those of us who read and post to SWJ may be guilty of the same sin. I just trust that we tend to be a liitle more reflective about our presuppositions than the average person who tunes into Rush Limbaugh
or reads Ann Colter (I don't mean to single out conservatives by these two examples--they just happened to be the first two names to come to mind).

Sorry for the long post and the heavy philosophizing, but this thread is about Ph.D. advisors, isn't it?

[Stan]

Good Evening from a Chilly Estonia (minus 27 C. Yes Marc, that's cold here)

Without the flexible mindset, any translations will be transliterations which loose a lot of the actual meaning.

Marc,
God I love hearing that ! How many times I told our CA guys, "yes, you can read it (open source), but did you get it?"

Evening Tom !

Others do not; the Kinshasa crowd Stan and I endured with 2 exceptions fit this model.

Who was the second ?

[Shek]

On the issue of adaptability training, I've often felt that the best "training" I ever got for doing fieldwork wasn't from school, but through training in improvisational acting. One of my friends in the theatre community used to train RCMP people for undercover work, and he would run them through improv training and then plop them down in a city with no money, luggage or ID, except for an emergency coin to make a phone call (if they used it, they failed). They had to report back to a particular location after 72 hours, at which point they would be debriefed and scored. The only person who ever scored 100% walked in wearing a $1000 suit, with another $6000 worth of luggage and a lot of cash.

It's "The Amazing Race" and a cultural SERE school all in one! This would actually be a great experience, providing motivation for learning some language and how to interact with people in a positive way so that you can get from point A to point B without any money.

[Jedburgh]

...On the issue of adaptability training, I've often felt that the best "training" I ever got for doing fieldwork wasn't from school, but through training in improvisational acting. One of my friends in the theatre community used to train RCMP people for undercover work, and he would run them through improv training and then plop them down in a city with no money, luggage or ID, except for an emergency coin to make a phone call (if they used it, they failed). They had to report back to a particular location after 72 hours, at which point they would be debriefed and scored. The only person who ever scored 100% walked in wearing a $1000 suit, with another $6000 worth of luggage and a lot of cash...

Similar in some respects, but it certainly wasn't a scored competition, was the final day of a Turkish "Headstart" course I attended when first assigned to a remote nuke detachment as a young artilleryman many years ago. (All cherries remained at the Group HQ near Istanbul until completion of inprocessing and the headstart course, then we were sent out to our various detachments) On the final day of headstart, our instructor brought us all out to Istanbul's Grand Bazaar - and then abandoned us. After just two weeks in-country, and four days of basic language instruction, we had to fend for ourselves and find our own way back. It was a real learning experience.

[sullygoarmy]

Dave,

That is the central core of cultural understanding--the mindset. That's why I harp on 2 base rules---you have to have the mindset. Even the best linguist in the world is useless and may in fact be harmful without that mental framework. I have talked this issue with SF and FAOs and others; I believe the selection process has to include some form of adaptabilty measurement.

Where I have faulted the Dept of State in the past is their "adaptability" measures are really focused on how adaptable applicants are to a European/US centric environment centered on class structures and associated definitions of what constitutes "higher culture." In many ways the OSS and then the CIA followed the same path in selection and recruitment with he major exception that the OSS/CIA has always been willing to head hunt among the military, especially for covert operations.

Again Dave, you got it!

Tom

Tom,
This is something we are struggling with at JCISFA and trying to determine how to pick, grow and train advisors. Lots of good info on successful and non so successful advisors out there through history. Having a cultural mindset is vital to the success of our current and future advisor missions. The regular army (ie, not SF) does not have the selection process, psychological screening, personality assessments etc of their advisors today that the SF normally does. Advisors are, for the most part, tasked and receive limited training on what it means to be an advisor and techniques for gaining influence with their counterparts. I like one of the other comments in this thread that a good advisor may have to buck the system a little bit to go against the grain of traditional military culture to be a successful cultural warrior. Good stuff!

Sully

[Stan]

Tom and Sully,

The other K-town embassy guy who was ok was the senior econ officer--at least he actually came and discussed things.

I had this bad feeling you were going to nominate him ! Yeah, he did come by with some interesting observations, which you always seemed to have answers for

I like one of the other comments in this thread that a good advisor may have to buck the system a little bit to go against the grain of traditional military culture to be a successful cultural warrior. Good stuff!

That's unfortunate and perhaps not always needed. I had great officers over the years that let me do it "Stan's Style" and I always tried to get home by 11 and with the info we were after. Tom would later offer me a beer

Yes, Sully, a tad confusing and simple. But hea, it worked.

Regards, Stan