As a kid I remember watching my dad work in our garage, mainly with wood, making things with a table saw, drills and other tools that he handled with apparent ease.  I watched, but seldom participated.  For one, I was often on my way to a basketball or soccer game and simply monitored his progress as a passing observer.  And secondly, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too interested.  Maybe it was because I didn’t understand what was going on before my eyes, but I never asked my dad to teach me, though I’m sure at times he tried.

Now, I’m 26 and I can’t make anything.  I can land a $230 million aircraft in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the recent project of putting up a fence in our backyard terrified me (so instead I spent large sums to have other 20-somethings do it for me while I watched suspiciously through my kitchen window).  Lately this has really been bothering me.  I’ve been “struck dumb by my own dumbness,” as William Deresiewicz once wrote.

According to Matthew Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” I’m not the only one.   It seems to be a trend that more of us our living life with very little control or understanding over the things that we own and operate.   We’ve ceased to be a culture of makers and settled for strict-consumption.  As evidence, high school shop programs are increasingly being cut with their funding redirected to more “modern” endeavors.  We, as a culture, have begun choosing to buy instead of make and replace instead of repair.  In doing so, Crawford contends that we’re losing our grasp on the world around us and ultimately a part of our soul.

Crawford explains in the introduction that he would like to show us what we lose when we no longer work with our hands and to,

“…speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.  Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the “opportunity costs” of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educated the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past.  But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that instantly steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

He repeatedly points out that he isn’t trying to attach mysticism to manual labor, indeed plumbing is often just about unclogging drains, but as a burnt-out think tank director turned motorcycle repairmen he delves deeply into what makes manual trades so satisfying.   In doing so he taps into a growing tide of people searching for a measure of self-reliance in an increasingly outsourced and virtual world.

“We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”

Critics of Crawford say he paints too great a divide between office work done in cubicles and manual trades done in shops and construction.  Not all office work is soulless and dull, just as not all manual labor is satisfying and filled with a sense of innocent artisan pride.

I agree that at times Crawford makes it seem as though to work in a white-collar occupation is to leave one’s soul and brain at the door, but he writes from his own life experience.  Growing up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, Crawford learned to tinker with his VW engine, worked as an electrician in high school and eventually ended up at the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in political philosophy.

During that time he also took a job writing abstracts for academic journals, a job which he accounts quite hilariously, noting the irony of being forced to dull his inquisitive mind in favor of meeting daily quotas; this in a job that he specifically took for its seemingly intellectual slant.  All this to say, the mix of the academia and manual labor gave him unique opportunities to judge the merits of both ways of life and it’s these personal experiences that make for an authentic discussion.

However, to paint this book simply as a debate between two different types of work would be severely misleading.  Thanks to Crawford’s background in philosophy, he craftily plumbs what is means to be human, quoting Aristotle, Heidegger and others while slowly digging away at the very roots of how we acquire and use knowledge.

He contrasts the very objective truths of motorcycle repair and other manual trades, either the bike starts or it doesn’t, to the often ambiguous and subjective truths found in most knowledge economy jobs where the status quo is often to, “…avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit.”

Francis Fukuyama reviewing the book in the New York Times sums this aspect of “Shop Class” in much more fluent prose than I could muster,

“Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing.  The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.  They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.  In this world, self- esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you.”

It’s in the depth of this argument that many will find the words they’ve been searching for to describe their general unease about everything moving to a knowledge economy, team-building activities and all, where everyone is a manager, a manager of other people’s stuff and ideas.  Rather than simply moving things around and repackaging them in the ether of the markets Crawford stands as an educated voice warning us not to abandon our manual competency in search of admittance into a theoretical, creative class that is often more concerned with consuming rather than actually creating.

It’s true that not everyone can be a motorcycle repairmen or electrician, nor should they, but for those who have slipped into passive consumerism as a lifestyle, this may be the best argument yet as to why we all need to spend a little more time in the garage, building things, not to mention ourselves.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Daniel Pink, author of, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” and his latest, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” explains why the majority of what we know about motivation is wrong.

Citing many recent studies, Pink shows that traditional carrot-and-stick approaches to management, such as pay bonuses for good work, only apply jobs that are purely mechanical.  For jobs that require even a small amount of rudimentary cognitive skill, pay incentives actually led to worse performance.

In the following video, RSA (The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce…whew) animates Pink’s ideas in real-time as he talks.  If it seems distracting at first, just give it a minute, the animation helps us visual learners digest Pink’s ideas and ends up adding some insight.

(definitely worth 10min of your time.)

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“The private sector has flattened and streamlined the middle and upper echelons of its organization charts, yet the Defense Department continues to maintain a top-heavy hierarchy that more reflects 20^th Century headquarters superstructure than 21^st Century realities.”  - Defense Secretary Robert Gates, May 8, 2010

Sounds eerily familiar….

“Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners?  Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”

No coincidence that his May 8th speech was given at the Eisenhower Library echoing the President’s prophetic  farewell address where he warned against the, “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

See the rest of Secretary Gates’ speech here.  Well worth the read for anyone interested in seeing the brewing storm coming over Versailles on the Potomac.

Further reading:

“Gates Calls for Paring of Military Bureaucracy” – WSJ (h/t Timothy Thompson)

“America’s Defense Meltdown” by Winslow Wheeler

“Lessons in Unsustainable Futures: GM and the DoD”

“Rethinking the Military’s Organizational Structure”

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“The leader has more power over those who are more dependent.” – pg. 55, The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership

Power is the ability to get something done.  It is “capacity that can be converted into control.“  And it is this control that often leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths as few enjoy the idea of being “controlled” by another.  We all like thinking of ourselves as free people.  However, power marches onward despite our feelings.

The authors of The 52nd Floor highlight an interesting way to view power — as a function of dependencies.  In other words, the people who have the most power over you are those upon whom you are most dependent.  Of course, the relationship works the opposite way as well.

You gain power within an organization or relationship when you, “…increase the dependencies others have on you or decrease the dependencies you have on others.”

To understand power, one must develop a deep knowledge of the various relationships at work within an organization.  To answer the question, “who has the most power?” one must first ask a more nuanced question, “who is dependent on whom?”  The answers may be surprising.

For a long time now power has tended to be viewed as something that is earned as one climbs his way up the greasy pole of an organization’s hierarchy, but the culture of the workplace and consequently its power structure have changed with the entering of the millennial generation into the workforce.

The authors offer this insight into the origins of power as created by virtue of need,

“The power others have over us is nothing more than a function of desire. By strongly desiring a relationship with someone, we often grant him or her the power to influence us. In this sense, power is not a possession, but rather our own compliance given onto someone else. Power is created by virtue of need. It is exchange within a relationship between the ‘needy’ and the ‘provider.’”

Part of the reason old CEOs and generals find managing millennials so difficult and frustrating is that we feel much less dependent on the company or organization to fulfill our needs, viewing life as something we can take into our own hands rather than waiting for it to be bestowed upon us in the form of a company car or fancy title.  Work is not our life.  We’ve seen the tattered hopes of our parents who tried to be good company men only to end up burnt out and unfulfilled…so we’re choosing a different route, one less dependent on the company to satisfy our hunger.  In a very literal sense, we’re out of control.

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Daniel H. Pink writes on why we do what we do when it comes to our work (h/t Delayed Echoes),

Business writers, myself included, have emptied many a toner cartridge opining on ‘management’. But rarely have we taken a step back to scrutinise the concept itself. We act as if it somehow emanated from nature or was delivered to us by God. In fact, management is something somebody invented. It is, as business thinker Gary Hamel says, a technology. And it’s a technology from the 1850s. British railways notwithstanding, there are very few technologies from the mid-19th century that we’re still using today.

Management is the ideal technology if you’re seeking compliance – getting people to do what you want them to do, the way you want them to do it. But in today’s workforce, which demands much more in the way of creative and conceptual capabilities, we don’t want compliance. We want engagement. And self-direction is a far better technology for engagement.

————–

This is one of the many aspects of our nature that separate us from donkeys. Yes, we do respond well to carrots and sticks in many circumstances. Yes, those second drive motivators are effective for certain tasks. But in the end, human beings are not simply smaller, slower, better-smelling donkeys. We have a third drive – the need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. That’s what makes us human. And increasingly, it is our humanity that makes us effective.

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A recent review of David Kilcullen’s upcoming book, “Counterinsurgency” included a section in which the author claims, “Rank is nothing: talent is everything.”

This brings me to a question that I’ve been bouncing around in my head for the past couple years, “is the military’s organizational structure/rank system outdated?”

The answer is absolutely, yes! Valdis Krebs explains,

When change was slow, and the future was pretty much like the present, hierarchical organizations were perfect structures for business and government. The world is no longer predictable, nor are solutions obvious. Old structures are no longer sufficient for new complex challenges.

Businesses have noticed the changes and are adapting. From GE’s boundaryless organization to Toyota’s amazingly flexible supply web, agility and adaptability are the mantra. Unfortunately most governments are not as quick and creative. Instead of the out-of-the-box thinking found increasingly in the business world, governments are busy shuffling boxes on the organization chart.

John Robb channeling John Boyd makes the case the war is essentially a contest in decision-making. This means in the case of the U.S. military, an outdated organizational structure is bad…very, very bad,

Let’s start with an assumption: War is a contest of minds. Therefore, the process of using minds — decision-making — is the core process upon which all warfare is built. Weapons, tactics, methods, systems, organizations, strategies, etc. are all derivative of this fundamental framework. Therefore, a narrow view of warfare is that it is a race to make decisions that optimize these derivatives within the restrictions imposed by access to resources and the other side’s attempt to do the same (friction).

A more expansive view is that all decision making processes exist within the abstract mental models we use to understand the (complex, uncertain, and complex) environment we live in. Unfortunately, these models are at best flawed approximations that only get more flawed over time. So, we may conclude that warfare is in large part an ability to use decision making, in particular cycles of analysis/synthesis, to create new/revised mental models that are closer approximations of the environment’s true nature.

Is the current organizational structure of the U.S. military, one consisting of rigid hierarchy and ever-increasing layers of bureaucracy the one best suited for making decisions in a dynamic, complex, globalized world? Not even close Robb explains,

Even under the most ideal conditions, its dubious whether the US military’s decision making loop (the sum total of the intellectual product of the entire military bureaucracy) can even closely approximate the requirements of the rapidly evolving global environment we currently find ourselves in. In short, we are falling behind ever more every day.

In the amount of time it takes information to travel up through all the levels of the chain of command, then back down, the situation has already changed. Each level of hierarchy makes it more likely that the organization will fail to adapt in time.

What we need is to go back to the drawing boards and emphasize decentralization, a promotion system that cares more about the quality of ideas rather than length of service, bottom-up solutions and direct lines of communication between the lowest and highest ranking officials (cut out the execs, middle-men, large staffs that filter out certain pieces of upsetting information before it hits the ears of the commanders).

So smart ones, I realize it is 10x easier to point out the problem then it is to come up with viable solutions. How does the U.S. military begin moving towards a more effective, relevant organizational structure? Is it a lost cause, is the bureaucracy too far gone to reverse direction? Maybe so, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.

***Update to Post 4/30/2010***

Here’s a Harvard Business Review post on 21st century leadership

The hierarchical model simply doesn’t work anymore. The craftsman-apprentice model has been replaced by learning organizations, filled with knowledge workers people that don’t respond to “top down” leadership. Seeking opportunities to lead, young people are unwilling to spend ten years waiting in line. Most important, people are searching for genuine satisfaction and meaning from their work, not just money. For example, Medtronic’s 38,000 employees are motivated by the company’s mission of “restoring people to full life and health.”

——-

The challenges businesses face these days are too complex to be solved by individuals or even single organizations. Collaboration — within the organization and with customers, suppliers, and even competitors — is required to achieve lasting solutions. Leaders must foster this collaborative spirit, eliminating internal politics and focusing on internal cooperation. After becoming CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano transformed IBM’s long-standing bureaucracy into an “integrated global network,” shifting to “leading by values” and breaking down silos that kept people from collaborating.

The ultimate measure of effectiveness for leaders is the ability to sustain superior results over an extended period of time. Organizations filled with aligned, empowered and collaborative employees focused on serving customers will outperform hierarchical organizations every time. Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders can galvanize the entire organization to sustain long-term performance.

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Once in a great many moons you open up a book and step on a mental land mine like the following,

“Does Leadership Exist?”

This question has caused me confusion, frustration, anger, enlightenment and ultimately a humble clarity and desire for further thinking in the three days since having it posed to me in “The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership” by Dr.’s David Levy, James Parco and Fred Blass.

Before you cross this off as a cute little Jedi mind trick take a second to chew on it.  And while you’re at it here’s the story (my riff) the authors present to go along with it.

An elderly gentleman who once was the CEO of a Fortune 100 company is invited to give a talk on leadership to a group of senior executives.  He starts as most would expect by talking about things like vision, hiring good people, empowering employees, etc.  Then he suddenly pauses for an uncomfortably long period of time and says the following,

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can continue this speech.  The truth is that I don’t think leadership exists.”

The execs in the room look at one another with a bit of embarrassment and sadness for an elderly gentleman who has obviously lost his way…and possibly his mind.  Before they can exhale the speaker continues,

“Believers in leadership can recite many phrases, slogans and variants of definitions regarding what they think leadership is, but it is always used to describe what happened in the past.  Actually, it’s a bit of a tautology.  Companies that have done well are said to have had great leadership.  Poorly performing companies have had poor leadership.  None can reliably tell us where it is going to be, how it will get there, and most importantly, whether it will succeed once it arrives.  I’m not saying that leaders don’t exist; I’m not that crazy, yet.  Leadership?  Damned if I have a clue?” (emphasis mine)

Here’s what I wrote in the book after thinking about the question and story for a little while,

After spending four years at an institution dedicated to “producing leaders” and reading countless books on the subject, I know all of the canned definitions of leadership, all the phrases like “influence” and “common objectives.” But, of what help this is I’m not sure. I know good leadership when I see it, but I have begun to believe that so much depends on context — the specific time, place, leader, operating environment all dictate a unique approach or paradigm. Not only that, but a great deal depends on the follower as well. All this to say, it is complex, far too complex to sum up with a few bullet points or checklists. In fact, I wonder if these formulas do more damage than good, causing us to believe we have a map in our hands and calling off the search before it has even begun. What we need may be less about learning how to lead and more about learning how to think.

Those were my initial thoughts. Now that I’ve had some more time to think, here are a few more.

The majority of books on leadership are not just a waste of time, they are a fraud. As the elderly former CEO stated, leadership always describes something that happened in the past. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in “The Black Swan” we humans have an extreme penchant for what he calls the narrative fallacy, or our desire to simplify, summarize or otherwise explain complex things that happened in the past rather than having to deal with the uncertainty that comes with not knowing.

In other words, things that we can’t explain scare us, so we invent stories (or 5-step plans) to make ourselves feel better.

Leadership on a large scale requires dealing with complex, dynamic systems that never remain the same long enough to completely control.  This requires more synthesis and less analysis, holistic thinking rather than strict reductionism, an excellent ability to OODA, build snowmobiles (see John Boyd) avoid the trap of the narrative fallacy…but here I go again, jumping down the rabbit hole of listing traits for what it means to be a great leader.  I’ll stop before I do damage.  My head hurts.

So what do you think?  Does leadership exist?  If you took it out of the dictionary would anything change?

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When high ranking officials seek to find out the “truth on the ground” they often discover the task much more difficult than expected.  It is usually not because the front-line personnel don’t know what is going on, but rather, few are willing to risk speaking candidly if they know the information will be viewed negatively by leadership.

This is unfortunate as it leaves leaders with a false sense of security.  “…but they said everything’s going great.”  It is something which goes on in many organizations, but the military rank system seems to exacerbate the issue.

There is an unnatural aura around the shiny pieces of medal on people’s shoulders that seem to act as a force-shield, blocking out reality and striking fear in subordinates.  Obviously not the intended effect (at least not most of the time), but one that exists nonetheless.

Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist recently wrote an article in the Financial Times admonishing us to “Listen to the Bearers of Bad News.”  Here’s a snippet:

One of Friedrich Hayek’s obvious-once-pointed-out observations is that society is full of local knowledge, often of a subtle nature and only fleetingly exploitable.  That is one reason why decentralised market processes tend to work well.  When a hierarchy has to exist, Hayek’s insight is the reason why bosses should want to receive truthful assessments of what is going on the shop floor (they don’t) and subordinates should be happy to provide them (they aren’t).

What makes matters worse for any organisation is that the same dynamic is taking place at every level.  Each middle manager is a fresh obstacle to the flow of truth up a hierarchy of wastebaskets.  Sensible managers try to let information flow freely, but many are happy to reinforce the barricades for their own peace of mind.

The results of barriers to communication can be catastrophic.  H.R. McMaster’s influential study of decision-making during the Vietnam war, Dereliction of Duty, is packed with examples.  The joint chiefs of staff were warned by their chairman, Maxwell Taylor, that Lyndon Johnson did not like “split advice”. Johnson’s defence secretary, Robert McNamara, argued that government would be ineffective if department chiefs were to “express disagreement” with the president.  Not disobey, but “express disagreement”.  Johnson trusted McNamara implicitly and relied too heavily on the advice of a man he praised as a “can-do fellow”.   Isolating himself from dissent, the president made a series of disastrous decisions.

The new television series, Undercover Boss, has made a name for itself by finding a creative way around this barrier to truth.  CEO’s of major corporations “dress-down” as low-level employees in their own companies to uncover the truths that would otherwise be relegated to talks around the water-cooler.

I posed the question on Twitter the other day,

“wondering what would happen if Generals pulled an ‘undercover boss’ and dressed up as civilian contractors working with the military?”

I think they might be surprised how different their military looks.

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In a recent Washington Independent article, Spencer Ackerman asked the all-important, but seldom asked question, “Why Should Defense Spending Be Sacrosanct?”

It’s not popular to ask this question, especially if you’re a congressman because in doing so you’re bound to be labeled as not supportive of the troops.  However, the present course of the DOD is completely unsustainable. And in our current economic state ($12 trillion in debt and counting) I, like Ackerman and others, find it odd that there has been no serious talk of freezing the gargantuan DoD budget. In 2008, the US military spent more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined (see here).

The spending problems come from personnel costs on one side — full retirement benefits for members who serve 20 years of active duty (most retire in their 40′s and now live well into their 80′s and beyond, a.k.a. 40 years of retirement pay), rising healthcare costs, salaries, housing pay, etc.  Equipment costs on the other — planes, bullets, tanks, UAV’s and an aging fleet of …well, almost every weapon system you can think of.  Just to send one combat troop to Afghanistan costs the taxpayer $1 million a year.

Almost everyone close to the organization knows we’re plowing ahead like a drunk driver headed for the cliff, but no one seems up to the task of fixing it.  Worse yet, much of the leadership seems bent on simply increasing spending rather than fixing a broken system.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is making a noble effort, but the military-industrial complex is a three-headed monster, devouring every plan formed against it through strategic lobbying, creative bookkeeping and a view of the world based more on fantasy than reality.

Ackerman cites an October assessment from the CSBA’s Todd Harrison who compares the DoD to GM, explaining (emphasis mine),

Another similarity between the two is that both organizations are in a period of disruptive change in the competitive environment. In GM’s case, its market share rapidly eroded as gas prices climbed higher, the economy slowed, and consumers turned to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM found itself building a fleet of SUVs and trucks that consumers did not want and could not afford. Similarly, DoD now finds itself saddled with a number of weapon programs whose capabilities are ill-suited for the types of conflict the military currently faces and whose costs have risen beyond what the Department can afford. Many of the new weapons being funded today are optimized for middle-of-the- spectrum conflicts—that is, conventional, military-on-military conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991. But adversaries are well aware of the United States’ overwhelming advantage in the middle and are instead moving to either end of the spectrum: irregular warfare on one end and high-end, asymmetric warfare on the other. The challenge for DoD, as it was for GM, is that the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.

The last sentence is key, “…the competition is adapting faster than it can keep up.” Much of it has to do with the huge, inflexible, bureaucratic organizational structure of the DoD as compared the nimble, decentralized, open-source structure embodied by al-Qaeda and affiliate organizations. One bans twitter, facebook and gmail while the other uses the internet train to organize its cells all over the world.

Changing the DOD’s organizational structure is one thing, putting a freeze on the defense budget is another and one that may be a bit more realistic. However, none of this is bound to change anytime soon if we insist on keeping our country in a state of perpetual war.

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. – James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

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Management brainiac Tom Peters gives us his bare bones guide to success:

“So here are ‘the real basics’—in five words. Achieve Excellence at these five things and the world (of human organizations) will pretty much be your oyster. ”

1. Read. (Outstudy ‘em.)

2. Write. (Clear, concise, powerful.)

3. Talk. (Presentation mastery. Study. Practice-practice-practice. Storytelling, mastery of.)

4. Listen. (Study. Practice-practice-practice. Understand enormous power thereof.)

5. Appreciate. (Engaged. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Appreciative always, enormous power thereof.)

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The brilliant military theorist and father of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW), William Lind, recently posted the last of his 326-part series entitled, “On War.” I always listen to what he has to say because so much of what he has predicted has come to pass. Here are some of his final thoughts on war, the US military and the future.

“In particular, the theory’s definition of Fourth Generation war has proven prophetic. Since 1989, the world has witnessed a progressive weakening of the state and rise of alternative, non-state primary loyalties, for which a growing number of men are willing to fight. That is the heart of my definition of Fourth Generation war. As Martin van Creveld says, what changes is not how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.”

“The second point I would close with is that the U.S. military doesn’t get it. Some European militaries do get it. Many Fourth Generation entities (not all) not only get it, they are writing the book. But the U.S. military is largely an intellectual void. Its two implied (and related) theories, that wars are decided by comparative levels of technology and by who can put the most firepower on targets, have both been proven false. Were they true, we would have won the Iraq and Afghan wars quickly. In fact, the Pentagon was so blinded by its false theories it thought we had won them quickly. Sorry, guys.

While many junior and field grade officers in the U. S. military have found value in the Four Generations framework (which says that American armed forces are not one, but two generations behind), the brass studiously ignores it. ‘Not invented here’ is part of the problem, but the larger part is that our major headquarters think little if at all about war. What they think about is money. 4GW does little to justify bigger budgets. On the contrary, it suggests that most ‘big ticket’ weapons programs are irrelevant to where war is going. That is not what the brass, or the defense companies they plan to work for after retirement, want to hear.

What might change that picture? Nothing will change in DOD until the money simply isn’t there anymore. The news, which is simultaneously good and bad, is that the money soon won’t be there. Like every previous imperial power, we are bankrupting ourselves. A trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there, and soon it adds up to real money. The twin financing mechanisms of piling up debt and debasing the currency can only go on so long. We can already see the night at the end of the tunnel.”

Popularity: 3% [?]