"Left of the Boom"

"Left of the Boom" is a phrase that General McCrystal used recently in the 'Boots Off the Ground' panel discussed in my last post. I would like to discuss it as it applies to leadership. As an example I will use Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia in 1941, as an example. General McCrystal used it in the context of our response to IEDs when they were first used in Iraq. Initially the response to the threat posed by IEDs was to deploy armored vehicles and secure the area after one was detonated. This allowed us to evacuate casualties and potentially kill or capture any insurgents who might have stayed to create an ambush. However, this did not solve the real problem, IEDs were still killing soldiers, contractors, and civilians, slowing or stopping our convoys, and creating chaos in general.
The solution, General McCrystal said, was to "get ahead of the boom", stop the IEDs before they were detonated. Thus they instituted regular patrols, sniper teams conducting over watch, and other measures that prevented the IEDs from being deployed in the first place.
This is a large and important part of a leader's job. Great leaders must be able to look forward and identify incoming problems and stop them before they happen. This happens at two levels. First, executive leaders are positioned to see the big picture and make substantial changes thereto. In our example, Operation Barbarossa, the freezing cold of the Russian winter represents the 'boom'. German high command knew about the cold, but believed they could make ti to Moscow and defeat the Russian military before the cold effected them too much. Not only did they fail to set realistic goals, they had no contingency plans for if those goals failed. When those two are combined they are fatal. Getting left of the boom for them would have meant either, a) equipping their men and equipment to operate in the cold or b) developing a plan to fall back to prepared positions if the Russian forces remained unbeaten by a certain point.
However, while executive level leaders have the ability to influence the big picture, they often overlook details, or occasionally miss the big picture entirely., which is where mid to lower level leaders come in. It is their responsibility to make the big picture as described by the executive leader happen as best they can ad pass up bits of information or warnings when appropriate. Thus, while mid level leaders must have a general understanding of the big picture, their focus must be on the areas under their control. Lower levels of an organization are often tempted to waste time and energy complaining about the ineptitude of their commanders. While such complaints may often be valid, and valuable in their place, they are often unproductive. The German infantry officer who sent a few messages up the chain and then proceeded to train his men to deal with cold weather would ultimately have more impact than the officer who spent most of his energy complaining to or about higher.
So, take time to get above the crush and grind of now, the things immediately important. A little time each week looking ahead will go a long way to getting left of the boom for you and yours. Even if you are not at the top, getting you and your people out of trouble, even if it isn't as neat and tidy as if higher had done it, will still make a difference, which is what being a leader is all about.


image from The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/06/operation-barbarossa-russia-second-world-war

Wiley's "Boots Off the Ground"

With our struggling economy, shrinking national budget, and political gridlock, America has to decide how to effectively use the money and military she has to effect the policy goals she is trying to achieve. Covert Operations apparently promise cheap solutions to big international problem. But are they cheap in the long run and can we depend on their devastating success to continue for the foreseeable future?

Wiley Lecture Series recently hosted 'Boots Off The Ground: A 21st Century American Military', which looked at the role covert operations have and perhaps should fill. Retired Army General Montgomery Meig moderated the discussion between Ambassador Ryan Crocker who served in several countries in the Middle East, Mr. David Sanger a journalist who has focused on our confrontations with rogue states, and General Stan McCrystal, who oversaw U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and led led JSOC for several years.

Before we can talk about how military forces accomplish their mission, we have to understand what is at the base of their mission. Military force is an arm of political policy. Military action always seeks to achieve a political aim, whether it is the destruction of Nazi aggression or the securing of national interests abroad. Use of Covert Ops should be seen not merely in how it helps us defeat hostile militaries, but in how they help us achieve our national policies at home and abroad.

At the center of the discussion was the benefits and costs of using cover operations in place of conventional forces. There were three specific types of covert operations discussed.

• Drones: They have proven themselves reliable and effective on a wide range of missions. However, in several instances they can cause collateral damage in civilian casualties, which may turn out to make them counterproductive in the long run.
• Cyber Warefare: Bloodless, high tech, and apparently clean, everyone thinks they are very cool. it has a very high potential to be turned back around on us. In 2010 the program Olympic Games malfunctioned and America's cutting edge offensive cyber weapon was broadcast all over the world for everyone to look at and pick apart. Also, leaks in the cyber age dwarf leaks in the Cold War era where files had to be photocopied one page at a time. Now someone can carry out on a flash drive or post on the internet millions of files full of sensitive information. 
• Special Forces. Very effective and precise, America boasts the best overall Special Forces in the world. However, a contributing factor in their success has been a technological gap between them and their targets that is rapidly shrinking. In addition, special forces are primarily useful to remove negative forces opposing our national strategy. They have limited usefulness in nation building or projecting positive influence that our policies may call for. 

America wants to project its influence around the world. While many are opposed to us swinging around the world police bludgeon, there are always areas we are expected to deal with, whether it is facilitating peace talks and general stability in the Middle East or South America, or Nuclear Proliferation treaties, convention foces deployed and with the willingness to be deployed are vital. Iraq could not have been stabilized and rebuilt without the surge of 2007 which put large numbers of conventional troops on the ground. 

Also, we have not yet faced an opponent with similar Covert capabilities. The targets we have hit so successfully are not too dissimilar from our own structures of command and control. What will happen to an american command and control post when a  North Korean or Chinese Spec Ops team knocks out the power? How will we prevent that from happening, and how are we going to develop contingencies for when it does? In 1960 we believed that air to air combat would be decided with high tech missiles and thus a gun was not necessary. The F-4E was modified with a 20mm gun not long after earlier designs first saw combat. we cannot rely on new high tech equipment to the detriment of conventional equipment. 

A modern military must balance conventional with covert forces in the same way the F-4 had to balance its armament. Not only will our technological edge shrink, but everyone is trying to figure out how to beat the army we have. We cannot sit content with the fact that we have gotten ahead of the curve with covert ops. We must continue to look for the next curve and figure out how to win the next conflict before it is fought and we learn the rules have changed while we rested on our superiority. 

We will always need a conventional force that is capable of conducting operations like the Surge which put boots on the ground and enforce order. Covert Operations are devastating as supporting arms of broader policy and strategy, but they need other supports to create that devastating effect. 

Civil Forfeiture & Personal Responsibility

John Adams is famously supposed to have said that the American legal system was fit only for a religious and moral people, wholly inadequate for any other society. I don't have a source for that, but whether he said it or not, it is a valid point. In this article by Sarah Stillman, Stillman discusses the use and abuse of Civil Forfeiture in modern law enforcement.
       "The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime...In general, you needn't be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence."

The practice began with the prosecution of pirates and smugglers, where it was easier to prosecute the ship you had instead of the captain who was somewhere on the ocean thousands of miles away.  The practice was used later to help fund anti-drug operations, then expanded further with the Comprehensive Crime Control Act in 1984 which allowed a large percentage of the confiscated funds to be returned to local law enforcement by the federal government. This helps get funds out of the hands of drug cartels which are currently lopping heads off on the U.S.-Mexico border, and into the hands of underfunded law enforcement agencies. 
The problem arises with incidents like those recorded in Stillman's article, when local police use the law to fleece law abiding citizens. Officers will target rental and out of state vehicles, stop them for minor or made up offences like speeding or driving too close to the white line. Once stopped, they offer the driver two options, be charged incarcerated and charged, or sign over their valuables to the city. In one instance two parents were told their child would be taken away and placed in a foster home if they did not sign over their cash. I encourage you to take the time to read the article, it lays out a very interesting view of our law enforcement that it is our responsibility to hold accountable. 

This is the reason that a government of limited powers operated by virtuous citizens is a good idea. What we have in Civil Forfeiture is a piece of legislation, like many passed by our government, that has great potential to do good. Many of us would agree that confiscating drug money and funding local law enforcement with that money isn't a bad idea. However, the law's potential to be abused is just as great if not greater. Few of us would agree that innocent people being harassed in this manner is a good thing. 
The knee jerk reaction that many of us have is that there needs to be a new law, a new oversight committee,  some government action that will solve the problem. But all the laws in the world will not stop humans from behaving like humans. The IRS has oversight committees, the NSA has oversight committees, and every citizen sits on the presidential oversight committee. Yet in the last few months we have discovered that the IRS has been discriminating in a horrific manner based on organization's political leanings, the NSA has been performing unprecedented surveillance on our own citizens,  and Benghazi continues to be at best a grisly monument to the stupidity of our government or at worst an act of treason. 
We have long looked to the government as the solution to our problems, and are now discovering like the ancient Greeks that the ruler's power to do good is equal to its power to do evil.  

Humanities in Crisis

About a week ago, Martin Cothran  linked to this article by David Brooks on the subject of why the liberal arts are such a joke in education.  Brooks writes “the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.” What is the reason for this? According to Brooks “Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn't want to offend anybody.”

I had the opportunity to see this first hand in my time at A&M, especially in my class on Literary Theory. Truth, in the class, was debunked and talked about as an unreal or irrelevant thing, and the focus was on how writers were influenced and how their works could be twisted to mean anything we wanted, thus proving an author had no control over his work. This was the subject of an essay I wrote for the class which I may post here at some point in the near future. Several people at The Imaginative Conservative have written replies to Brooks article which are very interesting, especially that of Louis A. Markos where he brings in a very enlightening quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.

However, while everyone points at the problem quite clearly, I think that most of them are missing the root of the problem. As Charles Clough says often, it all comes back to origins.

If evolution is true, if humans evolved from monkeys, then the humanities are a complete waste of time.

If mankind is evolving through history, which is the primary point of today’s scientism and atheistic revolution in the meaning of morality, then what Aristotle said thousands of years ago is monumentally irrelevant. What is driving much of the debate around abortions, gay marriage, euthanasia, social security, gun control, political philosophy, is the belief that mankind is advancing along a rising slope that begins with slime, rises through apes, rises through us today and beyond.

The problem with the humanities is that they deal with people, events, and philosophies all resting on that line between us and the apes, not between us and what we must become. They are, in effect, below us.

The humanities only make sense if we are created by a rational God who has revealed himself and his truth to mankind through the ages. Only if mankind is created in the image of God do the ancient philosophers have anything meaningful to offer besides a look at un-evolved man which should be taken quickly and mockingly.

Don't Stop, Don't Drop.

A friend of a friend of mine recently published this article on her blog, looking back at her experiences running cross country. There are a couple of things that jumped out at me in reading this especially in the context of me training my replacement for next year and the passing on of the Guidon which will take place this weekend. There is an exclusiveness that is a healthy part of an organization's structure and promotes higher performance, and that exclusiveness and performance must be matched with humility and a servant's heart.
For those of you who are not in the Corps, the Guidon is the unit flag which represents the standards, the history, and the goals of the unit, not unlike the Eagle of the Roman Legions. The guidon bearer is chosen each year in a process know as Guidon Candidacy, a two-three week period in which freshmen carry mock guidons during increased physical training and take part in a variety of leadership development and stress evaluation exercises. When I was a fish, the most daunting part of Guidon training was the high port runs, in which we carried our flags over our heads for 2-4 mile runs. As we fell out for our first high port run, the current Guidon bearer formed us up and said "I have one piece of advice for you when it comes to high porting, don't stop, and don't drop."
That piece of advice has gotten me a long way over the last few years. Don't stop trying, working, or giving and don't drop your standards, your morals, or yourself.
In the article, the author talks about the atmosphere that her cross country coach created, in part by talking about what made them different from the rest of the school. We do this a lot in the Corps, and it is apart of creating excellence in whatever organization we are apart of. This exclusiveness, this concept of us being separate and somehow better than them fosters a healthy pride in the organization and a drive to live up to the high standards that form our identity as separate from theirs. In the Corps, one of the forms this takes is attendance at Silver Taps and Echo Taps, where we remember and pay homage to the memory of Aggies and Cadets who have passed away. We pride ourselves on attending these events in mass because these ceremonies separate us from those who are not Aggies, those who are not Cadets.
This all by itself creates merely pride and snobbery. But there is a difference between the pride of a Marine and the pride of, say, a career politician. The second believe he has risen above the rest, is wiser and better than everyone else and is thus entitled to whatever its politicians are entitled to. The first, in contrast, knows that he has been trained beyond what most others have, knows that he is stronger and tougher than most others, but he knows also that that all the training and preparation has taken place so that he can serve others.
The author of the article talks a lot about helping others and focusing on what we can do for them. My junior year in the Corps one of my jobs was to conduct physical training tests for several units. The final event of the test was a mile and half timed run. At nearly every single test, the leaders of the outfit would come sailing in well under the time limit, wait for a few seconds to catch their breath, turn around and run back onto the track, reappearing a few minutes later running in with the slower fish who struggled to meet the time limit. They did not stand at the finish line beating their chests or bragging about their speed, they quietly used their gifts to motivate and encourage others.

That is why we must push ourselves, why we must work to develop ourselves and those around us, so that we may give back to others.
"Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working withhis hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth." Ephesians 4:28



Note: After my sophomore year, highporting was banned in the Corps and cadets are no longer allowed to conduct highport runs.

Do. Your. Job.

As my time in the Corps of Cadets is coming to an end, I have had the opportunity to look back at some of the lessons I have learned over the last four years. I've learned a lot about leadership and followership, mostly by making mistakes. The biggest lesson I've learned is as difficult to execute as it is simple to understand.

Do your job.

It seems simple, but I and others have wasted vast amounts of time and energy doing anything but. In the Corps, as in just about any organization, there is always something going wrong, something to worry, argue, complain, or debate about. There are always people who could be doing their job better, and there are always things that need to be done better. On the other side, there are always personal goals that we all have, either to do community service, grow in our relationship with God, or develop friendships with those around us. The problem that arises is when we neglect to fulfill our responsibilities and chase instead after other things, whether relationships or personal pleasures.

Too often we worry about the people who are not taking care of their responsibilities, and spend valuable time and energy complaining or gossiping about people who are not doing their job, time and energy that could be better spent completing our assigned tasks and leading those around us. Very often, if you perform your job well, you can cover for the mistakes or failures of others and you can set a good example for your subordinates and peers, which will in turn elevate their performance. People who do their job well consistently for long periods of time can build amazing amounts of influence and credibility. It does not happen overnight, but if day in and day out you show up and give 100% of your effort to do your job and then to help others, you will be able to have a positive impact beyond what you imagine.

I've often heard my dad talk about those Christians who are "so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good", and in the Corps I've seen people like this a lot. The Christians who had the most impact for Christ were not the ones who went to all the bible studies, were at church every Sunday  or made every christian retreat, but the ones who did their jobs well. I don't mean to belittle these things, they are very healthy and important for good christian growth. However, I have seen time and again young Christians come back from a bible study or retreat all excited and trying to minister to their roommate or buddies, only to get the cold shoulder. They wonder why their buddies don't respond more positively, and the answer is that while they were off 'getting into the word' and 'fellow-shipping with their brothers and sisters in Christ' their buddies were cleaning up the mess they left behind, scrambling to rewrite the training schedule that was left unfinished or unapproved, or giving the briefing that the christian skipped out on. Bible studies are important, no less than Church, retreats, mission trips, and all the rest, but if we are going to be good witness for Christ, we have to begin by taking care of our responsibilities to others.

It is easy at the end of the day to look at what you did and give yourself a pat on the back for being better than everyone else. You worked hard and they didn't. But remember a few things.
First, everyone has their own struggles and hardships. When you are picking up slack for someone else, remember that people have been picking up your slack since before you were born. Even aside from what our parents do for us, everyone has bad days, problems, and weaknesses. While today you are covering for someone else, someday you will need someone to cover for you.
Second, its not about you. At the end of the day what matters is if freshmen learned the drill movements, if the shipment got out the door, if the reports got filed, if the job got done. When we learn to be humble and handle our own load, we might have the opportunity to help someone else and achieve things bigger than ourselves.