Does the military do enough to engage with and draw on outside expertise?
Recent action in the security blogosphere has given some pointers. First, MG Michael Flynn launched a rocket via CNAS [pdf] – which in turn kicked off a big debate about whether or not Flynn had erred in airing his scathing review outside the Pentagon.
Flynn certainly managed to reach a wider audience for the report than would otherwise have happened, and perhaps now has a bigger stick with which to beat some institutional change into the intelligence bureaucracies. Perhaps because I’m still an old hack at heart, I particularly liked the authors’ idea of employing downsized journalists for the intel gathering and analysis, rather than trying to train up military folk to think like journalists. [h/t Danger Room] Not only did he reach out in publishing the report, but he advocated wider engagement in the day-to-day conduct of intelligence work.
Flynn’s novel approach is rare enough in the States, but could the same thing happen here? Maelstrom, in a recent comment on KoW, pointed out that it’s exceptionally difficult for Brits to write externally. Andrew Mackay managed, but then, he’s on his way out the door:
it is not an unwillingness by Senior Officers to think or for that matter write, but a risk advserse MoD which places such constraints on its people making any public utterance that often it is simply not worth the effort. All articles submitted to any publication – including BAR or Parameters – must first be censored by the Defence Press Office which takes a harsh line on any comment that deviates from the party line.
The Chinese wall looks pretty robust from where he’s sitting. Which reminds me that while the MoD strategy unit engaged, briefly, with KoW readers on the forthcoming Green Paper, they have yet to put in a promised reappearance. Perhaps the box marked ‘engagement with new media’ has now been checked?
Meanwhile, Asher Kohn adds to the debate on outreach. Reflecting on the US military’s travails filling slots in its experimental 912-strong AfPak corps he has a good suggestion to get round the problem: hire some geeks:
Once again, the knowledge and people trying to find it are out there. But trying to find soldiers who you can force into learning really complex customs and languages and sacrifice their careers while they’re at it is going to be difficult. Trying to convince history and linguistics nerds to study what they want: considerably less so.
If you can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be turning generalist officers into dedicated Afghan experts (they might be in Sudan next year, after all, or the Yemen), why not rope in some real scholars – they’re cheap, especially in a rapidly contracting academic job market. Human Terrain Teams show how not to do this, but that need not be the only way.
Lastly, Mike Innes balances my sense of optimism that even willing and talented geeks can get to grips with local nuance from inside the belly of the beast.
Despite working in some very interesting places – Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghansitan, as well as Western Europe – I couldn’t honestly claim to know much about them, and my own perceptions of those experiences are very much “the view from the veranda.” [...] I often found myself sitting behind the protective barrier of a desktop monitor, in Sarajevo, Pristina, Kabul, reading reports from the field and second-guessing the facts they purported to convey. I wasn’t far away; I was right around the corner. People sitting in offices, as it turns out, don’t need to be squirreled away in bunkers on the Potomac to do their damage.
Engaging with experts is part of a solution to imperfect knowledge, but only part. Still, better than nothing, I reckon. Let’s see now, academic, former journalist, likes the field … hmmm:
Bernard Fall, in his element
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Ken,
My cynicism notwithstanding, I think the debate on social distance and knowledge formation is a healthy one. Ultimately, as long as the analyst in question is an obsessive-compulsive ferret or bloodhound perpetually suspicious that there’s always one more piece of the puzzle that can be unearthed, and predisposed to critical evaluation of sources, then his output can generally be given a larger dose of trust than the usual. It doesn’t really matter whether he/she is a deskbound scholar, a forward deployed collector, a journalist, or what have you. That was my main issue with Flynn’s report: it was co-authored by a former journalist turned intelligence officer, and the report screamed of heuristic bias. It demonstrated a very shallow understanding of intelligence processes and structures at various levels of command, at least from a NATO perspective (the elephant in the room, btw). Moreover, whatever Pottinger’s qualities as a journo, he’s a junior officer with very little time in trade. That strikes me as extremely problematic, to put it mildly.
A problem with finding linguistics and history experts in my opinion would be finding a way to convince soldiers to respect them and to take their advice seriously. If those experts would be out in the field and actually working with soldiers, civilians, the local government, and foreign aid they would need to convince all involved that they have some kind of authority or vital expertise. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain but in the States we have a strong bias towards anti-intellectualism and it’s much easier to get soldiers to respect another soldier. Also scholars are generally wary of working with governments for a war effort, if they get involved in something dubious they could suffer for it professionally later.
It’s worth adding to this that Andrew Mackay spent a significant part of his article *begging* for more expert involvement, and lamenting his inability to find anyone who could tell him how it worked.
Tom, on which, here’s the late Bernt Glatzer in interview:
Would you work for the Pentagon?
No. I would consider such a request absurd and ethically objectionable. Most colleagues, also in the US, reject this. After all, we ethnologists get to our findings by winning the trust of those people, by living with them, by them sharing their knowledge and history. It is part of the ethnologists‘ professional ethics to tell his informants openly and honestly who their contractor is and what they plan to do with the findings of their research. If an ethnologist wanted to find out where the limits of the proverbial Afghan hospitality lie, he only needs to tell the people that he works for the US Army.
http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=506
Fair enough – I’m sure it’s a widely held view. Indeed I recall the anger from some US anthropologists about colleagues involvement HTTs. Not everyone shares his view, though. After all, the US national security establishment has a long track record of funding social science and humanities research, in a broad range of fields.
@Grant – well put.