Plato: WINNING!

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the military’s official ban on women in combat, which will open up hundreds of thousands of additional front-line jobs to them, senior defense officials said Wednesday.

“You accept, then, as we have described it, this partnership of the women with our men in the matter of education and children and the guardianship of the other citizens, and you admit that both within the city and when they go forth to war they ought to keep guard together and hunt together as it were like hounds..." [Plato, The Republic 466c]

"Bleeding Talent"

USAFA grad Tim Kane has written a book with a simple premise: the military as an institution is idiotic, broke, and it's driving talent away in droves. Here's an excerpt from the NYT review:

The military is perhaps as selfless an institution as our society has produced. But in its current form, Mr. Kane says, it stifles the aspirations of the best who seek to serve it and pushes them out. “In terms of attracting and training innovative leaders, the U.S. military is unparalleled,” he writes. “In terms of managing talent, the U.S. military is doing everything wrong.”  

The core problem, he argues, is that while the military may be “all volunteer” on the first day, it is thoroughly coercive every day thereafter. In particular, it dictates the jobs, promotions and careers of the millions in its ranks through a centralized, top-down, one-size-fits-almost-all system that drives many talented officers to resign in frustration. They leave, he says, because they believe that “the military personnel system — every aspect of it — is nearly blind to merit.”       

Mr. Kane knows whereof he speaks. An Air Force Academy graduate, he worked in military intelligence for five years before resigning, in the mid-1990s, after the Air Force declined to send him for graduate studies in economics. He is now chief economist at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group. In the years between, he helped start a couple of small companies and picked up a taste for entrepreneurship.

Read the full review here.

The Military Knows It Has a Morality Problem

From the National Journal.

Sexual abuse. Adultery. Misconduct. Divorce. Suicide. Has the U.S. military lost its way after a decade of war?


It has not been a good year for America’s armed forces. David Petraeus’s extramarital affair dominated headlines; 25 instructors are under investigation for systematic sexual abuse of cadets at Lackland Air Force Base; and a rash of senior officers—at the rank of colonel or higher—have been reprimanded for serious misconduct. Last month, Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to all four-star generals and flag officers asking for institutional soul-searching. Has the military’s behavior, he seemed to be asking, threatened the “sacred trust” among top officers, the men and women they lead, and the American people? “I know you share my concern when events occur that call that trust into question,” Dempsey wrote in the memo obtained by National Journal. “We must be alert to even the perception that our Nation’s most senior officers have lost their way.”

If they want to take Dempsey’s question seriously, senior leaders should ask themselves: Have the exigencies of war fostered a rules-don’t-apply attitude of unquestioned privilege among the top ranks, corrupting a culture of high standards and accountability? Isn’t it remarkable that Petraeus and his successor as top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, were both ensnared in the same e-mail scandal? (Allen denies wrongdoing.) Why did Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, a married former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, become involved with five women (he is under investigation after being accused of adultery, sexual misconduct, and forcible sodomy)? Did colleagues of Col. James H. Johnson III, former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Iraq, know that he was involved in a bigamous relationship with an Iraqi woman, and that he was attempting to steer government contracts to her father? Why did Gen. William (Kip) Ward, the four-star head of Africa Command, deem it acceptable to take his wife and a large entourage on lavish government-paid trips before he was stripped of a star and ordered to repay $82,000 to the Treasury?

For that matter, what does it say about the evaluation and promotion system for senior leaders that the Navy has been forced to relieve 60 senior officers from command in the past three years (a 40 percent rise over the previous three-year period), including Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette, who was dismissed from his command of the Stennis aircraft carrier group for “inappropriate leadership judgment” while it was deployed to the Middle East?

The fact that so many of the elite—the officers rigorously selected and groomed by the military—have behaved so badly shows just how deep the rot is, says Don Snider, a senior fellow at West Point’s Center for the Army Profession and Ethic. “Moral corrosion has spread throughout the entire profession of arms as a result of a decade of war,” he says. “War … creates a culture where cutting corners ethically becomes the norm.” So much so that military leaders are willing to look the other way. “I can almost guarantee you that in each case of ill-discipline by a senior officer, other people in the command knew exactly what was going on and either didn’t say anything, or it didn’t matter what they said.”

The problem goes much deeper than high-profile cases such as the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier earlier this year, the “sport killing” of three Afghan civilians last year by soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or the torture and debasement of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, says that his biggest concerns aren’t defense cuts or arsenal upgrades. He thinks the military must reverse what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called a “silent epidemic” of sexual assault in the ranks. According to the Veterans Affairs Department, one in five women report sexual trauma during their service. The admiral says that his second priority is coping with a military suicide rate that is up 22 percent over last year and may reach as high as one death per day this year.

Military sociologists and clinicians worry that the suicide rate is just the leading indicator of a tide of mental and physical suffering. This includes unacceptably high rates of substance abuse (binge drinking among service members ages 18 to 35 is 50 percent higher than among civilians, and, in surveys, up to one in four Army soldiers admit they abuse prescription drugs); divorce (the military divorce rate rose 38 percent from 2001 to 2010); and depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (a 2008 Rand survey found that one in five veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan—some 300,000 people—are suffering either from major depression or PTSD).

Prolonged exposure to combat triggers such intense emotions—fear, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief, survivor’s guilt—that some psychiatrists at the VA have coined a new name for the malady: “moral injury.” All of this threatens “to impede the reintegration into society of a whole generation of veterans,” says David SegalFull Almanac Profile »Recent Coverage », a sociologist who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

In response to the recent scandals, Dempsey has completed an initial review of ethical standards in the senior ranks. The findings are serious enough that he is creating a panel on “professional ethics,” which will include respected retired generals and academic experts. Its first order of business should be to consider whether the “moral injury” that so obviously afflicts the rank and file has spread to the military’s top echelon, and to the institution writ large.

This article appeared in the Saturday, December 8, 2012 edition of National Journal.

Philosophical Roots of Our Political Divide

In keeping with the season, Steven Pinker wonders why our nation looks like this...

Conservative thinkers like the economist Thomas Sowell and the Times columnist David Brooks have noted that the political right has a Tragic Vision of human nature, in which people are permanently limited in morality, knowledge and reason. Human beings are perennially tempted by aggression, which can be prevented only by the deterrence of a strong military, of citizens resolved to defend themselves and of the prospect of harsh criminal punishment. No central planner is wise or knowledgeable enough to manage an entire economy, which is better left to the invisible hand of the market, in which intelligence is distributed across a network of hundreds of millions of individuals implicitly transmitting information about scarcity and abundance through the prices they negotiate. Humanity is always in danger of backsliding into barbarism, so we should respect customs in sexuality, religion and public propriety, even if no one can articulate their rationale, because they are time-tested workarounds for our innate shortcomings. The left, in contrast, has a Utopian Vision, which emphasizes the malleability of human nature, puts customs under the microscope, articulates rational plans for a better society and seeks to implement them through public institutions.

Cognitive scientists have recently enriched this theory with details of how the right-left divide is implemented in people’s cognitive and moral intuitions. The linguist George Lakoff suggests that the political right conceives of society as a family ruled by a strict father, whereas the left thinks of it as a family guided by a nurturant parent. The metaphors may be corollaries of the tragic and utopian visions, since different parenting practices are called for depending on whether you think of children as noble savages or as nasty, brutish and short. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that rightists and leftists invest their moral intuitions in different sets of concerns: conservatives place a premium on deference to authority, conformity to norms and the purity and sanctity of the body; liberals restrict theirs to fairness, the provision of care and the avoidance of harm. Once again, the difference may flow from the clashing conceptions of human nature. If individuals are inherently flawed, their behavior must be restrained by custom, authority and sacred values. If they are capable of wisdom and reason, they can determine for themselves what is fair, harmful or hurtful.

Read the full column here.

Socrates on the 2012 Presidential Election

Prof. Gary Gutting went down to the Piraeus to talk to Socrates about the presidential election coming up in November...

SOCRATES: I’m against it.

GUTTING: I see what you mean. It’s going to be nasty, brutish, and long — not to say immensely expensive — but of course if we want a democracy, there’s no alternative.

S: I disagree. You shouldn’t hold the election at all. You should flip a coin instead.

G: You don’t see any difference between Obama and Romney?

S: Oh, I do. I’m very impressed with Obama, no question. He’s intelligent, courageous, self-controlled and has a good sense of justice. Just the sort of person I had in mind for my philosopher-rulers. But none of that’s going to make a difference to the American voters. The election’s likely to be close, and in any case the outcome will turn on the October unemployment report, the price of gas, an Israeli attack on Iran, who has the most money for attack ads in the last two weeks or some other rationally irrelevant factor that you don’t yet have any hint about.

G: But surely you’d prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?

S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don’t know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.) Take the economic issues all your commentators say will be decisive. I think Paul Krugman makes a decisive case that, for all its flaws, Obama’s approach to the economy is likely to be far more effective than anything Romney and Ryan have in mind. But there are prominent economists who reject Krugman’s argument. If Krugman’s right, you can’t trust the experts who disagree with him. So why should you trust the judgment of the non-experts whose votes will decide the election?

G: Well, aren’t we voters at least pretty good judges of character and competence?

S: I see nothing in the history of your elections to suggest anything of the sort. Is there any reason to think that over, say, the last 50 years, you’ve elected the “better man” at least half the time?

G: You may be right about this or any other particular election. But it would be crazy to give up the general idea of having elections. At a minimum, the people can tell if a government is grossly incompetent, deeply corrupt or even imposing tyranny. The fact that we have elections that can “throw the rascals out” is our only defense against the worst sorts of government.

S: You may have a point there. I always said tyranny is the one form of government worse than democracy. Let me modify my proposal. Once the parties have chosen their candidates — maybe through some tobacco-free version of the old smoke-filled room — you should immediately have a national referendum on whether to have an election. If things are appallingly bad, people will vote to have one. Otherwise, I’m sure they’ll choose to save money and aggravation, and flip the coin.

G: I’m not so sure. People are used to elections and, for all their complaining, they like the sense that they’re making big decisions — and they find the presidential horse race entertaining.

S: Well, of course, I realize that what I’m proposing goes against present inclinations and prejudices, and it might take some time for people to learn that elections aren’t usually worth the trouble. As you know, I’ve always had a utopian streak. But, details of implementation aside, the point is that what I’m proposing illustrates the only real value of democracy. It’s the best way to avoid tyranny, but it’s not a good way (no better than chance) of choosing policies and leaders. We Greeks, you know, did all right choosing leaders by lot.

G: But don’t presidential elections serve other purposes? Even if we could get just as good leaders and policies from a coin flip, doesn’t the extended discussion and debate of an election produce better formulations of the issues and of the opposing policies for dealing with them?

S: Just the opposite. Under your system, public policy debates are almost entirely political in the worst sense. Politicians are concerned only with making cheap rhetorical points that will arouse popular passions (remember “socialism” and “death panels” from the health care debate). Once you remove the need to gear policies to popular ignorance and fears, politicians will have to propose policies that they can successfully defend in debates among themselves.

G: So you trust the politicians more than you trust the people?

S: Yes, I do. For all their failings, most politicians are reasonably sincere, honest, and much more intelligent and educated on the issues than their constituents. Very few of them come up to the standards I set, but once freed from the necessity of courting uninformed public opinion, most of them could do a creditable job of making decisions in the public interest. And remember, without elections, politicians would no longer need the vast amount of money that gives big donors so much influence.

G: O.K., maybe you’re on to something. But — who’s going to flip the coin?

S: Hmm, I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose the Chief Justice of the United States.

G: Ah ha! There’s the fatal flaw!

From NYT's The Stone, featuring the writing of contemporary philosophers "on issues both timely and timeless."

"Let’s Draft Our Kids"

Thomas Ricks has an idea for re-instituting the draft, with a three-part option:

1. Military - 18 months of military service, basically lower-level scut work (paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around), so that the professional soldiers don’t have to. Low pay, education benefits, with the option to move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

2. Civilian - national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, receive similar benefits like tuition aid.

3. Libertarians - object to a draft? Opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

Read the article here.

The Infant Mind

Working to uncover the foundations of human knowledge, that is, what we "know" at birth, Dr. Elizabeth Spelke is following the path laid by Descartes, Kant and Locke. But in studying the bedrock categories of human knowledge - number, space, agency - she's going about it in a novel way: she's studying babies.

Read the article here.

Cracks in USAFA's Honor Code

The Air Force Academy's honor system might be losing its hold on the nation's future officers, but can the Academy actually track cadets' moral growth?

Read the survey of surveys here.

Evidence in Science and Religion

What constitues evidence? Is scientific evidence different from say, religious evidence? How? Stanley Fish has some thoughts:

The very act of looking around is always and already performed within a set of fully elaborate assumptions complete with categories, definitions and rules that tell you in advance what kinds of things might be “discovered” and what relationships of cause and effect, contiguity, sameness and difference, etc., might obtain between them. In Hebrews 11:1, St. Paul speaks of the “evidence of things not seen.” In the up-to-date accounts of scientific inquiry, the corollary would be “the evidence of things not directly seen,” but things that can be brought to (indirect and provisional) visibility by the assumption and application of powerful theories and the procedures they call into being.

Read the article here.

Out of Touch...?

As long as there has been war, there has been disgruntlment among the troops, sometimes aimed at the leaders. Here's a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel's take on OEF and ISAF. Is this that observation of someone who's out of touch with digital warfare, or is there some ground truth?

When I was a young officer in training, we mocked the European “chateaux generals” of the First World War who gave their orders from elegant headquarters without ever experiencing the reality faced by the troops in the trenches. We never thought that we’d have chateaux generals of our own, but now we do. Flying down to visit an outpost and staying just long enough to pin on a medal or two, get a dog-and-pony-show briefing and have a well-scripted tea session with a carefully selected “good” tribal elder, then winging straight back to a well-protected headquarters where the electronics are more real than the troops is not the way to develop a “fingertips feel” for on-the-ground reality.

Add in the human capacity for self-delusion, and you have a surefire prescription for failure.

Right now, our troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don’t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it’s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

Read the full commentary here.

The Strategic Staff Sergeant

From the NYT:

PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Displaced by the war, Abdul Samad finally moved his large family back home to this volatile district of southern Afghanistan last year. He feared the Taliban, but his new house was nestled near an American military base, where he considered himself safe.

But when Mr. Samad, 60, walked into his mud-walled dwelling here on Sunday morning and found 11 of his relatives sprawled in all directions, shot in the head, stabbed and burned, he learned the culprit was not a Taliban insurgent. The suspected gunman was a 38-year-old United States staff sergeant who had slipped out of the base to kill.

Read the article here.
In contrast, read USMC Gen. Charles C. Krulak's original 1999 article on the Strategic Corporal here.

Stockdale to His Men: Know Thyself

BRIEFING TO AIRWING FLIGHT CREWS BY CDR JAMES BOND STOCKDALE, USN, APRIL 1965, AS EXCERPTED FROM STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT – USG SHARP PRESIDIO PRESS SAN RAFAEL 1978

Having reviewed for you the terrain of Vietnam, the enemy’s order of battle, the rules of engagement, and to some extent the modern history of the conflict and the evolution of America’s strategy, I think I owe you in addition a straight from the shoulder discussion of pilots’ mental attitudes and orientation in “limited war” circumstances. I saw the need for this last summer aboard TICONDEROGA – after the start of the war had caught us by surprise and we had gone through those first, exciting days pretty much on adrenaline. In the lull that followed, as we prepared for a next round, I could sense that those fine young men who had measured up so well in the sudden reality of flak and burning targets wanted to talk and get their resources and value systems lined up for the long haul. Like most of you, they were well read, sensitive, sometimes skeptical – those educated in the American liberal tradition to think for themselves – those who are often our most productive citizens – and just as often, our best soldiers. They realized that bombing heavily defended targets is serious business and no game – that it is logically impossible in the violence of a fight, to commit oneself as an individual, only in some proportion of his total drive and combative instinct. It has to be all or nothing; dog eat dog over the target. I think they were asking themselves, as you might – Where do I as a person, a person of awareness, refinement and education, fit into this “limited war”, “measured response” concept.

I want to level with you right now, so you can think it over here in mid-Pacific and not kid yourself into imagining “stark realizations” in the Gulf of Tonkin. Once you go “feet dry” over the beach, there can be nothing limited about your commitment. “Limited war” means to us that our target list has limits, our ordnance loadout has limits, our rules of engagement have limits, but that does not mean that there is anything “limited” about our personal obligations as fighting men to carry out assigned missions with all we’ve got. If you think it is possible for a man, in the heat of battle, to apply something less than total personal commitment – equated perhaps to your idea of the proportion of national potential being applied, you are wrong. It’s contrary to human nature. So also is the idea I was alarmed to find suggested to me by a military friend in a letter recently: that the prisoner of war’s Code of Conduct is some sort of a “total war” document. You can’t go half way on that, either. The Code of Conduct was not written for “total wars” or “limited wars,” it was written for all wars, and let it be understood that it applies with full force to this Air Wing – in this war.

What I am saying is that national commitment and personal commitment are two different things. All is not relative. You classical scholars know that even the celebrated “free thinker” Socrates was devoted to ridiculing the sophist idea that one can avoid black and white choices in arriving at personal commitments; one sooner or later comes to a fork in the road. As Harvard’s philosophy great, Alfred North Whitehead, said: “I can’t bring half an umbrella to work when the weatherman predicts a 50% chance of rain.” We are all at the fork in the road this week. Think it over. If you find yourself rationalizing about moving your bomb release altitude up a thousand feet from where your strike leader briefs it, or adding a few hundred pounds fuel to your over target bingo because “the Navy needs you for greater things,” or you must save the airplane for some “great war” of the future, you, you’re in the wrong outfit. You owe it to yourself to have a talk with your skipper or me. It’s better for both you and your shipmates that you face up to your fork in the road here at 140 degrees east rather than later, 2000 miles west of here, on the line.

Let us all face our prospects squarely. We’ve got to be prepared to obey the rules and contribute without reservation. If political or religious conviction helps you do this, so much the better, but you’re still going to be expected to press on with or without these comforting thoughts, simply because this uniform commits us to a military ethic – the ethic of personal pride and excellence that alone has supported some of the greatest fighting men in history. Don’t require Hollywood answers to “What are we fighting for?” We’re here to fight because it’s in the interest of the United States that we do so. This may not be the most dramatic way to explain it, but it is the advantage of being absolutely correct.

Are There (Real) Online Friendships?

Barbro Froding and Martin Peterson don't think so:

Based on a modern reading of Aristotle’s theory of friendship, we argue that virtual friendship does not qualify as genuine friendship. By ‘virtual friendship’ we mean the type of friendship that exists on the internet, and seldom or never is combined with real life interaction. A ‘traditional friendship’ is, in contrast, the type of friendship that involves substantial real life interaction, and we claim that only this type can merit the label ‘genuine friendship’ and thus qualify as morally valuable. The upshot of our discussion is that virtual friendship is what Aristotle might have described as a lower and less valuable form of social exchange.

Read the paper here.

The Ethics of Data

Ethical concerns over the explosion of data in cyberspace have primarily focused on privacy, identity and the potential for misuse. The World Economic Forum has outlined a broad program that refocuses the mining of data in ways that help people:

Utilising the data created by mobile phone use can improve our understanding of vulnerable populations, and can quicken governments‟ response to the emergence of new trends. Actors in the public, private, and development sectors are beginning to recognise the mutual benefits of creating and maintaining a "data commons" in which this information benefits society as a whole while protecting individual security and privacy. But a more concerted effort is required to make this vision a reality.

Read the briefing here.

Hearts and Minds

A report prepared for ISAF's RC-East claims the rising number of coalition forces being killed by Afghanistan National Army and Police partners is indicative of a deeper animosity growing between the allies' lower ranks.

“Lethal altercations are clearly not rare or isolated; they reflect a rapidly growing systemic homicide threat (a magnitude of which may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern military history),” said the report. Official NATO pronouncements to the contrary “seem disingenuous, if not profoundly intellectually dishonest.”

Read the article here.

The Shifting Application of Airpower

From carpet bombing and cluster munitions to overwatches and shows of presence, the (re)development of COIN Ops in Afghanistan has brought combat aviation to heel:

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

Read the article here.

Ethical Rules for Robots

In September of 2011, the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council hosted a conference of experts drawn from the fields of technology, industry, the arts, law and social sciences, to develop rules for robots in society. The result, five ethical rules for robots:

1. Robots are multi-use tools. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans, except in the interests of national security.

2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots should be designed & operated as far as is practicable to comply with existing laws & fundamental rights & freedoms, including privacy.

3. Robots are products. They should be designed using processes which assure their safety and security.

4. Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.

5. The person with legal responsibility for a robot should be attributed.

Read an expanded version of the principles here.

Can Plato's Cave Help to Explain Addiction?

Of course it can. Peg O'Connor explains how:

[Addicts] engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise.

Read the article here.

How far Should Science Take Us...?

NYT's Armchair Ethicist posed the following:

Recently, scientists at two laboratories tweaked a dangerous bird-flu virus in order to make it more contagious. Was it ethical to even undertake such an experiment? Does the importance of preparing for a pandemic justify publishing the experiment’s results? Should the importance of preventing bioterrorism justify governments’ suppressing the information? Is some information simply too dangerous to share — or even to ascertain?

Read the responses here.

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman..."

... who's had her salon appointment interrupted by a bunch of young zealots. To wit:

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.

Read the story here.