To Be or To Do

“One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make your compromises and … turn your back on your friends, but you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself … You may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won’t have to compromise yourself … In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision: to be or to do.”

-Col. John Boyd

What American Foreign Policy Was Meant To Be

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.  She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.  She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.  She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart … Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.  But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.  She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.  She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.  She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.  The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force … She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....”

- John Quincy Adams, address to US House of Representatives, July 4th, 1821

Self-Awareness, Orientation, and Culture

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

One of the first things a beginning psychology student is taught is that, despite what people think, they actually do not know know themselves very well.  This is a well-established fact.  Who you think you are and who you really are often differ greatly.  In many cases other people know you better than you yourself do.  We must be skeptical when evaluating ourselves, and the quest for self-awareness must be an ongoing struggle.  This is often uncomfortable and it is easier said than done.  But, as Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  While he was talking about scientific integrity, the saying applies to self-knowledge. 

A large part of who you are is how you view the world.  You may think that you the world exists as it appears to you, that you see it and so you understand it. But here you are fooling yourself.  You never objectively observe the world.  An example of this is seen constantly: Two people in the same place, at the same time, witnessing the same event and each having a drastically different account of what occurred . This is because we don't see the world as it is, with perfect knowledge.  We only take in hints (observations) and it is how we interpret those hints that defines our understanding of the world. 

That interpretation is called orientation. And as the late John Boyd described, it is essentially a filter made up of our genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, new information and the analysis and synthesis of information.  All these things act on and manipulate our observations to provide us with our understanding the world around us.

And if you are not aware of how these things affect your understanding, then you are not aware of the limitations of your orientation and where there may be errors that cause a divergence between reality and your understanding of reality, between what you think the world is and what it really is.

So again, we go back to self-awareness.

But how can you assess your own orientation when it is a part of how you view everything, when it is the lens through which all information comes to you?  Didn't Kurt Gödel say that it is impossible to understand the nature of a system from within it?  So, how can you step outside yourself to gain this understanding?

John Boyd points to Edward T. Hall as providing an answer for how to do so, at least for the "cultural traditions" aspect of our own orientation:

"Everything man is and does is modified by learning and is therefore malleable. But once learned, these behavior patterns, these habitual responses, these ways of interacting gradually sink below the surface of the mind and, like the admiral of a submerged submarine fleet, control from the depths. The hidden controls are usually experienced as though they were innate simply because they are not only ubiquitous but habitual as well.

… The only time one is aware of the control system is when things don’t follow the hidden program. This is most frequent in intercultural encounters. Therefore, the great gift that the members of the human race have for each other is not exotic experiences but an opportunity to achieve awareness of the structure of their own system, which can be accomplished only by interacting with others who do not share that system …"
- Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture

So the next time you experience something strange in another culture, take note.  Ask what it is telling you about your own perspective, and get to know yourself better.

Much learning does not teach understanding

1. Much learning does not teach understanding.

-Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC), On the Universe

2. I have always found the name of a person's Alma mater to be a better indicator of their ego than their intelligence.
 
3. I think Mark Twain was in agreement when he said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."  

4. Sir Ken Robinson certainly is, as he demonstrates in this video on how our flawed education system is a product of industrial age thinking. 

5. Socrates said, "I know that I know nothing."
(more precisely: This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing [anything]. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe [that I know anything].)

6. TS Eliot was probably thinking of that when he wrote, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

7.  Henry Rollins points to experience as key to true knowledge when he says, "You can sit in school all your life, which is cool to do for some years, but then you gotta take that knowledge and go out. Knowledge without mileage = bullshit to me.  So you have to take what you know and then go out into what Mark Twain called 'the territory' and break your nose on it."

8.  Thomas Sowell brings us back to Heraclitus when he defines the difference between intellect, intelligence, and wisdom:

"The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect.  
Wisdom is the rarest quality of all - the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding.  Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, 'With all your getting, get understanding. Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one's own experience and of reason itself.  The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous."

9. Aristotle identified that man alone is a rational animal.  This ability to reason is what sets us apart from all the other animals.  As such, if we do not use this ability, if we do not practice it, refine it, strengthen it, feed it, then we are in essence, no better than animals.

10. Which is probably why Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.

Intellect Is Not Enough...Four Quotes

I. From a report concerning men recruited to work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services during WWII):

"The organization has been recruiting too many men, civilian or military, who have intelligence and sometimes the necessary mechanical training but who lack common sense, know nothing about working with men or how to look after the welfare and morale of the men under them. We simply must have men who can shoulder responsibility and use initiative with common sense. Simply because a man is intelligent does not qualify him for this type of work."


II. Then-Major Carstens, OIC of a SF detachment commanders' course in 2002, cited by MAJ
Major Fernando M. Luján in his report Light Footprints:The Future of American Military Intervention:

"The OSS, when selecting officers to parachute into occupied France, described the ideal candidate as a Ph.D. that can win a bar fight. We don't just want an officer that can carry a hundred-pound rucksack on his back. We need someone who can think and improvise." 
 

III. Statement made by German general Hermann Balck about a division commander in WWII on the eastern front:

"It is interesting to note, incidentally, that this fellow was a highly rated General Staff officer. Clever, but unfortunately not very practical. So we were always brought back to the fact that cleverness is a curse. Clausewitz once said, 'Man needs a harmony of strengths.'"


IV. Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama
 
"The concept, James C. Scott reminds us, comes from the ancient Greek poets and philosophers. Mētis refers to a broad range of practical skills that sailors, athletes, doctors, statesmen, and others use to respond to a 'a constantly changing natural and human environment,' including prudence, perceptiveness, ingenuity, elusiveness, and deceit. This crafty intelligence 'bears on fluid situations which are constantly changing and which at every moment combine contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other,' observe Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, a pair of Greek classicists and two of the foremost authorities on the subject."

Why The Founders Matter

"It is fashionable in these days to regard [George] Washington- and America's other Founders - as irrelevant, as dead white men, as antiquated, and as morally abhorrent because some of them owned black slaves. This attitude is a mistake for any American to take.
The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers.

The Founders eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American Constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the "political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature..." The Founders' wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.

- Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq

The Four Kinds Of People

by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

"I divide my officers into four classes: the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid.  Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities.  Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy.  The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations.  But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!" 

Alternately quoted as:
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

(Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (September 26, 1878 – April 25, 1943) was a German general who served for a period as Commander-in-Chief of the Reichswehr. He is famous for being an ardent opponent of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

"Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions."

"Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war – against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except that in this world are tigers.

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course – but they did it the Army's way.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened.  Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals. And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semi-bitter alienation from their own culture ('What's the matter, Colonel; can't you make it on the outside?') but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the Army the civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles. In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did – but it could not have changed its nature.

But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized, America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around – the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Legion Etrangere, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule – but they must be fit to fight.

The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

Without its tough spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.

The time came when the descendants of Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like "Can Do." In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots – there was money for these – the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded.

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits – and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel's trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last. It would have died, but it might have held.

The recommendations of the so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the will – if not the actual power – of the military traditionalists, and left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old.

What the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in 1946, was to gauge the future.

The military have the preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our un-sane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won. Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield – Sparta knew that trap – but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did."


- Every line of this was cut out of T.R. Fehrenbach's 1963 book This Kind of War, and specifically from Chapter 25, entitled Proud Legions.
This is my more concise, but obviously less rich edit, with some minor rearrangements to emphasize a point.