Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
"Eight CIA officers are dropped into the mountains of northern Afghanistan on October 17, 2001. They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the first Americans to operate inside Taliban territory. Their covert mission is to track down Al- Qaeda and stop the terrorists from infiltrating the United States again."
Most may be familiar with one member of that team, Mike Spann. This Sunday we will spend the hour talking about that Team, the first few months of the Afghanistan conflict, and what the war and its future looked like early on as described in the recent book, First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11.
Toby is an author, journalist, and a winner of the Orwell Prize for Books. A former foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and the Daily Telegraph who reported from thirty-three countries, he specializes in terrorism and war. Born in Portsmouth, England, Harnden was imprisoned in Zimbabwe, prosecuted in Britain for protecting confidential sources, and vindicated by a $23 million public inquiry in Ireland. A dual British and US citizen, he spent a decade as a Royal Navy officer before becoming a journalist. He holds a First Class degree in modern history from Oxford and is the author of Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh and Dead Men Risen: An Epic Story of War and Heroism in Afghanistan. Previously based in London, Belfast, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Washington, DC, he lives in Virginia.
Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.
At 50 years old, (Paul) Douglas arrived at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in 1942 to begin boot camp. The economics professor was more than twice as old as the average Marine recruit and Douglas remains the oldest recruit to pass through Parris Island.
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Initially, Douglas was assigned to the personnel classification section of Parris Island after becoming a Marine, but he was not content with the idea of writing training manuals for the rest of the war, so with the help of his good friend Fred Knox, who was serving as Navy Secretary, Douglas became an infantry officer.
Douglas was commissioned as a captain after spending just seven months as an enlisted Marine and then he shipped out to the Pacific, where he fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. ... Douglas, who was serving as a division adjutant, had been allowed to take part in the invasion on the condition that he stay away from combat, yet he routinely volunteered to be a stretcher bearer to evacuate wounded and fallen Marines from the frontlines, Howard Shuman wrote in a 1979 profile of Douglas for Challenge, an economics magazine.
During one of his trips to the front, Douglas saw that the Marines desperately needed a flamethrower and ammunition for rocket launchers, so he grabbed what was needed and braved heavy mortar and small arms fire to deliver it to the front lines.
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As a leader, Douglas was credited with putting his men first. Shuman wrote how during one battle, a Navy corpsman refused Douglas’ order to treat wounded Marines who were under heavy fire.
“He said he was a Harvard Medical School graduate with training too valuable to risk his life,” Shuman wrote. “Incensed by his refusal, Douglas took out his weapon, pointed it at the doctor’s head, and marched him to the front lines. Years later he told me he still shuddered when he thought about it: he had been so outraged that he had been prepared to shoot the man if he refused again.”
Read it all ... because if you are well read in American history or quirky economic theory, you may recognize that name.
A foundation stone of DivThu for over a decade and a half is this simple concept: in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial nation, the most destructive thing that can be done by leaders who value it is to encourage people to divide themselves along racial, ethnic, or other sectarian lines. No society in human history has ever prospered by doing so,
Martin Luther King Jr. was right, the only solution is to judge someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
We once extended this concept to include race, creed, color and nation origin. Not only is that the only way to promote unity, and from that unity receive national strength and cohesion, but also it is fair. Regardless of what you personally do in the course of your life, you cannot change your race, creed, color or national origin. Well, honestly you can't.
It is bad enough when division is done on a personal basis, but what if it is done on a government directed basis? We've seen that before. It was ugly and hateful then, it is ugly and hateful now.
What if such discrimination isn't just promoted by your government, but is considered one of the most important things your military should be focused on?
We know that promoting sectarianism does not produce unity and peace in a nation, why would it be thought of as something that would promote good order and discipline in a military?
It doesn't, but people promoting it don't care. They have other agendas to pursue. There is a small cohort in it as well meaning but wrong people - but the vast majority are in it for the most crass reasons; a paycheck, status, or power, all woven in with resentment and grievance. The most pitiful are those who are scared of people with status and power, or are terrified they might be called a name. We've discussed at length here. New readers can click the Diversity tag below to catch up if they need to.
In the last year, as things have gone pear shaped in this area, some good news and leaders have started to appear to push back. Slowly but firmly some political leaders are stepping forward. These include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AZ) is one, and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI).
Both of these gentlemen are deeply involved in defense issues, and served as officers in the Army and USMC. They get the danger. They know the terrain.
I'd like you to take in Rep. Gallagher's recent speech on the topic he recently gave at Hillsdale College.
Here are a few pull quotes from the transcript. He's taking no prisoners;
...in his first week on the job, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand down to confront “extremism,” forcing all commanding officers to spend a day discussing extremism using a PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Joint Staff that included Ted Talks asking “What is up with us white people?.” Austin also created a new position, “Senior Advisor for Human Capital, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” He hired a man named Bishop Garrison for the position and to run his “Countering Extremism Working Group.” And though Secretary Austin could not define extremism when questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) five months after his extremism stand down, Bishop Garrison can. Rather than focusing on violent or illegal behavior, his past Tweets brand all those who voted for former President Donald Trump as extremists and racists.
Well get back to Garrison at the end of the post;
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point likewise required cadets to attend a seminar on DEI and promoted presentations on “White Power at West Point” and “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” When questioned about this by HASC members on June 23, 2021, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said he was personally offended by the accusation that the military is woke and he defended DEI instruction, saying: “I wanna understand white rage, and I’m white, and I wanna understand it...I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
Admiral Mike Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations, recently included Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist on his “Professional Reading Program,” which is supposed to help sailors “outthink our competitors.” Kendi, a “leading historian” according to one Ted Talk included in Secretary Austin’s PowerPoint on extremism, has called Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett a “white colonizer,” argues that capitalism is “essentially racist,” and warns “racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic…threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change.” Kendi also calls for the creation of a Department of Anti-racism “comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees…empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” When questioned by HASC members on June 15, 2021 about why he included Kendi on his professional reading list, Gilday accused his critics of “trying to paint the United States military, in this case the United States Navy, as weak, as woke…I do know this: our strength is in our diversity and our sailors understand that.”
Milley’s and Gilday’s comments get to the heart of the matter. When Chairman Milley compared reading Woke texts to reading Mao and Lenin, he unwittingly gave away the game. We read Mao and Lenin to understand our enemies and their tactics. We do not read Mao’s Talks at Yan’an for ideas of how to better run our military. Yet that is precisely how Milley and Gilday are approaching these Woke texts: as useful tools to help better run the Pentagon because of platitudes such as “diversity is our strength.”
Bingo. Exactly correct. We have two options here with CJCS and CNO:
1. They don't know this, in which case they are woefully out of their depth and are being malignantly supported by their staff.
2. They do know this, in which case they are incredibly destructive people holding responsibilities outside any sane nation would allow them to have.
It should be noted that here Milley and Gilday are not simply pointing out that America’s e pluribus unum melting pot is an asset for U.S. military recruitment and that we should be proud that we live in a diverse nation with a diverse military. Nor are they making the narrower argument that, as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate, a dearth of specialized linguistic and cultural skills can cause death on the battlefield, and there are certain diverse competencies such as fluency in Mandarin or facility with cyber warfare that we must further develop so we are better prepared to beat the CCP in a future war. They are instead asking us to embrace a brand of identity politics that is fashionable on the Left right now, one which judges people explicitly by the color of their skin rather than on their merits as individuals.
They are also making specific and dubious claims about racial and gender diversity based on bad social science. To illustrate this point, consider the recent comments of the chief of Navy personnel, Vice Admiral John Nowell, Jr., who suggested we need to reinstate photos for selection boards so skin color can factor into promotion. Nowell also asserted “we know that diverse teams that are led inclusively will perform better.” This claim appears to come from a “Task Force One Navy (TF1N)” report commissioned after the death of George Floyd. Though TF1N concedes the Navy is more diverse than the U.S. population, it offered approximately 60 DEI recommendations, including de-emphasizing the use of standardized academic tests for Navy recruits, “bias awareness training” for all promotion board members, and developing a “subjectivity mitigation tool” to combat unconscious biases.
TF1N even quantifies the assertion that “diversity is our strength”, saying “diverse teams are 58 percent more likely than non-diverse teams to accurately assess a situation.” Here TF1N cites a 2014 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studying price bubbles in experimental markets. The experiment used 180 strangers “trained in business or finance” whose exposure to “diversity” meant briefly sitting white traders in a waiting room with other traders, where “at least one of the [other traders] was an ethnic minority.” These test subjects then made fake stock trades alone in their “separate cubicles” through a computer terminal. So contrary to TF1N’s portrayal, the study says nothing about teams (decisions are made alone by individuals) and nothing about assessing “situations” (it is about pricing and purchasing decisions).
TF1N also claims “gender-diverse organizations are 15 percent more likely to outperform other organizations and diverse organizations are 35 percent more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts.” This claim is completely inconsistent with the extant literature on gender, as recent meta analyses show 0 to negative effects for gender. Yet TF1N selectively cites a single 2015 McKinsey study called “Diversity Matters.” McKinsey’s study uses a modified version of something called “the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI)” to quantify the racial composition of company boards and claim racial diversity correlates with greater Earnings Before Income and Taxes (EBIT). Yet McKinsey’s HHI formula is such that a company with one white, one Native American, one Latino and seven black members would score as less diverse than a board with six white and four black members. McKinsey’s correlation is also likely weak because they lump their data on 366 public companies into quartiles, comparing only the bottom quartile to the top quartile and thereby conveniently omitting half the data set.
How any serious person in uniform can support TF1N again after this simple but fact filled take down, I have no idea. I guess they can try, but I don't recommend they try it on The Hill,
It should alarm us that the same military leaders we trust to train our sons and daughters for war are building their DEI agenda upon a foundation of fringe history and shoddy social science. Their underlying assumption that we can generalize (questionable) findings from academia and the private sector to the specific business of asking young men and women to kill and be killed for their country is an assault on common sense. Furthermore, those who view DEI as a harmless addition to the many annoying, administrative things the military must do ignore recent evidence demonstrating initiatives such as implicit bias training either are ineffective or actually intensify inter-group hostility.
There you go. One of the top people in Congress on military issues. He gets it.
In summary;
With such a poor empirical and methodological foundation, at best DEI will waste servicemember time and taxpayer money. At worst, DEI will undermine the foundation of our modern, all-volunteer force. This force is by design an exclusive, not inclusive, organization. We are lucky to draw from a diverse population, but we do not want the U.S. military to look like a representative sample of the population. We want it to be the best and the brightest. The U.S. military is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of skin color. For this reason, the military obsessively measures things like pullups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain. Put differently, diversity may be a strength for America, but it cannot be an organizing principle for the Pentagon. Actual strength—physical strength, mental strength, and overall end strength—is our strength.
The above are only a few paragraphs from a much longer speech. Lucky for you, we have the video.
Freshen up your coffee or adult beverage of choice, or set it up it so you can listen to it on your commute today, and watch it for yourself. As the cool kids say, "like and share."
This needs broad distribution and support. There are lot more battles to be fought to get to where we need to be. We need to reward bravery and good behavior, and support every friend we have.
A couple of additional items. Our friend Kristina Wong is writing on the same topic. Take time to give it a read.
Also, back to this Bishop Garrison character. It looks like he sees a shadow on his rice bowl. Give this summary a read, you paid for a it.
Just take a moment to consider the mass of senior leadership present inside a commute distance of DC. The amount of money they have access to. The amount of direct control they can exert through official levers of power and simply a phone call.
Look how they live.
Now ponder how our most junior sailors have been treated.
You know the Pacific theater of WWII. I'm not going to insult the intelligence of The Front Porch by repeating all the blood we expended to secure our stepping stones to defeat Imperial Japan.
We have warships named after battles, islands, and heroes. Just look at the map above, you all know it.
Since WWII, our victories with our allies secured the peace and established relationships generations ago with those who lived on these islands. Some are territories, others their own nations or commonwealths.
Have we forgotten their importance? Do we act entitled to their friendship and the access they provide? Are we sending our best people with well crafted policies to ensure that an expanding China does not - with bags of cash in one hand and corruption in the other - weaken our comparative advantage?
If you think we couldn't screw this up, you're wrong.
Patricia O'Brien's article at The Diplomat is sobering;
Alarm bells are ringing in Washington, D.C. over ... The drawing up of the future relationships between the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (Micronesia) and the Republic of Palau (Palau) and the U.S. ... These three nations’ borders cover an immense area of the Pacific Ocean that in the age of acute competition with China is of the highest strategic importance. In addition, Palau and the RMI both host vital military bases. In recent days the Pentagon has announced these nations as possible sites for additional military installations, an eventuality that hinges entirely on the future roadmap of their U.S. relationships.
The reason why there is such alarm in some halls of American power right now is that the Compacts of Free Association (COFA) between the U.S. and these three nations should now be in the advanced stages of renegotiation before they expire in 2023 and 2024 in the case of Palau. Yet there is an unsettling lack of action on this front. In the case of the most complex negotiation, that with the RMI, there have been no formal meetings since December 2020.
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In the context of escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, the COFA states have a unique position beyond their paramount strategic importance. Palau and the RMI are two of the last nations that diplomatically recognize the Republic of China government on Taiwan. Micronesia, by contrast, has had diplomatic relations with China since 1989 and has been expanding that relationship in conspicuous ways in recent years, to the point where Micronesia has been recently described as “the next U.S.-China battleground”. Yet Micronesia is widely relegated to the status of COFA partner of least importance in Washington, largely because it does not host military installations or have the nuclear legacy that shapes the U.S. relationship with the RMI. This is a situation that also clearly needs to change.
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From every angle, the COFA negotiations are urgently in need of the highest level of attention and remediation. The clock is at one minute to midnight on all the justice, climate, and strategic aspects of U.S. relations with the COFA nations. It is high time to heed the alarms. It is high time to heed the alarms, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recently issued invitation to Pacific leaders to participate in meetings on February 12, when he is in Fiji, may be a sign that the U.S. is starting to do so.
Clearly the US Department of State did not put even the JV on the project. If the boss has to get involved, then so be it. We don't need to have to fight our way back through these islands ... again.
China cannot be allowed to degrade this natural advantage cheaply. We don't have to do all that much to set it right along with our allies - including the British and French.
Time to up our game. We have some smart Pacific minds ... we can do this.
The U.S. Navy has promised a first deployment for its new aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford by this fall — but that deployment won’t be a typical one, the head of Naval Air Force Atlantic told Defense News.
Ford won’t fall under the operational command of a regional combatant commander. Rather, it will conduct a “service-retained early employment” period where the Navy keeps full control over the ship’s activities and schedule, Rear Adm. John Meier said.
The Navy keeping COCOM hands off their ships for awhile ... good. Nice habit. We should do this more.
The carrier and its strike group will operate on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean alongside a long list of foreign navies, he said. But the operations will be outside the typical Global Force Management-dictated deployment in support of the joint force.
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Meier told Defense News after the panel that this represented the best way to make use of Ford as it comes out of its first planned incremental availability in 2022, ahead of when the long-range Global Force Management plans begin to incorporate the new carrier. GFM is an approach meant to help oversee the allocation of forces.
Editorial note: in the name of all that is holy, please stop using GFM. For those of us with mild dyslexia, it is way too close to FGM and we have too many acronyms already. That and it sounds excessively bureaucratic. Same vibe as NLOS, NGAG, LSCvsLCS etc.
Under the new plan Meier laid out, the first GFM deployment could take place, roughly, on that 2024 timeline, meaning the Navy would squeeze in an operational employment of the carrier in 2022 without throwing off the joint force plan that dictates ships’ maintenance, training and deployment schedules.
Nice, but here is what I like about it;
Meier told Defense News the new carrier already has about 8,200 catapult launches and arrested landings — or cats and traps — from the extensive time the ship spent at sea in 2020 and 2021 for air wing integration, trials, new pilot carrier qualifications and more. Still, Meier said, the Navy has been unable to fully operate a carrier air wing the way it wants to: doing cyclical operations, with jet wings loaded up with missiles for mission training.
Solid. Just a solid idea as presented. In general, I'm a big fan of giving things to the fleet and let them try to work it. We learn a lot, find out what doesn't work like we thought it would, and as our Sailors always do - once they start to work with it they find things out - good and bad - that no one had thought of or appreciated sufficiently. The results at the end are hard to spin if you have the right leadership mindset and culture.
We're going to go through the playbook, but at a slightly lower level of effort and with not everything fully testing the ship and our Sailors. Good, just like a pre-game helmets-only football practice. Good.
No downside here. Learn a lot ... and less chance for unnecessary injuries before the big game.
Decades of peace and relative stability in Europe is suddenly shattered as armies start to mobilize on a scale not seen since WWII.
No, not 2022...but 1987.
What is there to learn for today from what could have happened at the end of the Cold War?
In addition to the above teaser questions, this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern with our guest Michael Cee we will dive in to the research, tools, wargaming, and art of creating alternative historical fiction about what may have happened with the wrong people in the wrong positions of power at the wrong time in the late 1980s.
Michael is the creator and author of World War III 1987, a blog that takes a detailed look at a hypothetical Third World War set in 1987, as well as several topics related to the NATO-Warsaw Pact military balance in the later years of the Cold War. He is also the author of a second blog, Today’s Defense and International Relations Topics that’s centered on contemporary geopolitical and defense issues and news. He is a 44-year-old former Air Force officer who has also spent time in government service and as a senior member of a research institute. He has earned an MSFS from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as an MPA and PhD in Politics from Princeton University. Over the summer of 2019, Michael signed a two-book deal with a New York City publishing house. At present he is making final edits on his first novel, which is also based on a hypothetical global conflict set in 1987.
Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.
