CDR Salamander suggests that the “War Gods of the Copybook Headings” are not happy with us, and he’s probably right:
Relief at the entrance of the Cultural Center of the Armies (formerly the Serviceman’s Casino) of Madrid (Spain), showing the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war).
Photo by Luis Garcia (Zaqarbal) via Wikimedia Commons.
Mindsets are universal.
Yes, no one can see the future. Of course, it is easy to play “got-cha” in hindsight. Yes to all the excuses … but that isn’t the point.
Two things to keep in mind as you read the below:
- Our “experts” may lack broad expertise. Always question. Defer only when earned.
- We have a horrible record of predicting even the predictable for a whole host of reasons, most bureaucratic.
- At peace, assume you have leaders who can only imagine peace unless they actively demonstrate otherwise, that they will plan and act in line with their priors. When war comes, it will be up to others to fix things (as they say in the movies, “When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches“.). The harder peacetime leaders are pressed by those who understand the constants of history, the less difficult the fix will be when war comes.
This is one of the virtue/vice dualities of democratic states. In peacetime, there is no political appetite for military spending and no political party will be eager to provide the opportunity to be accused of warmongering. An opposition party might briefly call attention to defects in the standing military, but only to embarrass the governing party, not because they would address the problem if they were in power. There may be widespread passive support for the military, but this isn’t represented at the ballot box because there are always far more urgent issues that drive how the voters allocate their support … and military spending is a lot of money put into things that don’t fix the roads, improve public health, address law and order concerns, or clean the environment.
Peacetime military establishments are huge bureaucracies at the best of times, and those who want to rise through the bureaucracy need to learn how use the same tools, schemes, and stratagems as in every other civil service organization. The longer a country has been at peace, the less capable the military administration will be of transitioning to a war footing. If you haven’t seen war in twenty years or more, then every officer up to the very top of the chain of command got there not for being a good soldier/sailor/airman but for being a good peacetime manager and administrator. This is totally normal, as is the massive disruption when a real war is imminent. If you’re lucky, some of those administrators-in-uniform can make the transition to being combat leaders quickly, but many of them will not be able or willing (it’s just human nature to resent and resist sudden change of long-standing practice).
Well meaning people can be wrong. Just because they are well meaning and have tenure-reputation-rank should not mean that everyone has to defer to them or their plans.
Good leaders with sound ideas and well developed plans will welcome hard questions and informed challenges.
Bad leaders with weak ideas and compromised plans will be defensive, flinty, and more often than not will resort to appeals to authority or credentialism. Those are your warning signs.
Sadly, highly isolated decision nodes — think the Transformationalists in the first half of the ’00s — don’t think they are wrong. They have filtered their information sources and filled out their staffs with either clones or the obsequious — often found in the same person.
They are the ones who have a blinkered focus on usually something far on the horizon that can’t be measured right now — but is very attractive to them for reasons of either a broader ignorance, ego, or monetary.
They don’t fully accept “risk” – they dismiss it.
In the area of national security — such a mindset and practice can create an existential crisis and it comes from hubris.
Smart people who are so convinced of their wisdom without humility will filter out any concerns, and won’t allow questions that might challenge their wisdom.
They may be right as they didn’t, mostly, get to where they were by being wrong — and they don’t consider they may not be and hedge accordingly.
