Escapable Logic

Tim Bray, co-inventor of the eXtensible Markup Language and one of the smartest people I know, is among the few journalists–citizen or paid–who added something useful to the London terrorism dialogue:

This morning I read on CNN that “Authorities across the United States worked to increase security on subways, trains, and other potential targets...”. That’s really, really stupid. If someone wants to kill you so badly that he doesn’t mind dying in the process, chances are he’s probably going to get you, and a few more cops on the subway aren’t going to help.

As for London, well we’re all Londoners today; but in the big picture Londoners have proven, plenty of times, that you can’t push them around this way. So this was not just sick, twisted and evil, but also futile. That’s three Western capitals in four years, yeah they’ll probably come back and do it again, and “tightened security” is just treating the symptoms. What’s the alternative? This may sound nuts, but doing our best to just ignore them would be good. They’re not gonna cause any policy changes this way, but at least they get to control what’s on CNN & the BBC for a while; maybe if they couldn’t even do that, the strap-on bomb would be less attractive.

My other radical suggestion—which some will denounce as treason—is to work harder at figuring out the “Why?” of it. I’m not saying that there’s any political grievance to which attacking New York, Madrid or London is a reasonable response. But when something is driving enough people into insane belief systems that we see regular explosions in our cities, it would be smart to care—a lot—what that something is. Because, on the evidence, I don’t think the leaders of the Western world have a clue.

"C'mon, Blaser," you might exclaim, "Admire the problem?! Now you've gone too far! Words like that are treasonous and do real harm to our troops!"

But "Admire the problem" is not my phrase. It's offered by Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson (3 stars), Commander of Marine forces in the Pacific, in a speech delivered at the Naval War College. The speech was reported by Inside Defense and quoted by Eric Umansky who went to the trouble of downloading it from behind the Inside Defense costwall. Eric's quotage:

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate,” said Gregson. “Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics . . . Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.”

Ah. A voice of reason. "Words have meaning." What a concept! The general is defecting from the marketing messages of his Commander-in-Chief and the other inexperienced, tough-talking Ladies-in-Waiting in Washington. Gregson's wisdom suggests that semantics are too important to be left to the politicians.

Gregson added, “What we’re fighting is an insurgency defined as a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence, subversion, propaganda, terrorism or other military action. But it’s different from other national insurgencies that we’ve known in the past. This one is networked thanks to the wonders of technology. It’s primarily ideologically driven, fundamentalist and extremist.”
[...]

“It’s a collection or a confederation of movements empowered by regional and global fundamentalist extremist insurgents,” Gregson said. “You can borrow an old phrase and say they think globally and act locally.”

[...] “The center of gravity, the decisive terrain in this war, is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world,” he said. “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people.”

People like the General who make a career of projecting our nation's force are usually serious minded and thoughtful. They know that wars are won by depriving the enemy of his supplies. A decentralized, open source enemy has only two strategic resources: hearts and minds. So a smart leader advises actions that the shallow administrators in the White House can't get their heads around: Do what's required and obvious. Deprive the fundamentalists of the hearts and minds of its potential guerillas and suicide bombers. The cost of being stupid about this is that it's killing our bravest young people and mortgaging the survivors' future.

“The main thrust of my remarks is that we know we’re stuck with the name, it’s going to be the global war on terrorism. . . . But even though we’ve got that name out there, we’ve got to at least in the security community and then further on through the greater world . . . explain what we’re about here and get it into something that is properly categorized and puts us on the side of the angels in various areas.”

We have a chance to start winning this war here and walk it back into the Middle East, but we can’t just continue to admire the problem,” Gregson said. “We have to start doing something and we have to start walking the propaganda back in the other direction and get ourselves on the right side of this issue.”

Providing doctors, engineers, dentists, veterinarians and other aid to enhance the lives of people living in very troubled parts of the world is “often far more important than projecting some type of force,” Gregson said.

Military Intelligence – Not always an Oxymoron

Those of us unfamiliar with–and suspicious of–how the military really operates assume that most soldiers are lantern-jawed gung ho types anxious to rush into battle and to die for the cause. In fact, most military leaders are smarter than you and me, far harder working and much more objective and adaptable to real-world conditions. That's why the level of discourse among the sophisticated soldiers–which thrives in the post-graduate programs conducted by the "War Colleges"–is superior to the blathering of the politicians and talking heads whom we continue to believe despite the clear evidence all around us.

Have we heard clearer thinking on the core challenge of our time? But we shouldn't expect a rational response to General Gregson's wisdom. Rather, it makes me cringe at the mental gymnastics the Terrorism Fan Club will exert to dodge his nuanced insights, simply because he exposes simplemindedness as a strategic blunder.

General Gregson implies that those with the strongest convictions are, as usual, the most mistaken, and that it's time to stop listening to opinions simply because they're strongly held. (Have you noticed the way shallow thinkers instantly react against messengers with unwelcome news, even when the messenger was a trusted ally moments before uttering the ideological impurity? It's true for everyone – notice how environmentalists excoriate their former colleagues who've discovered that the new thorium-based nuclear plants are much better for the environment than coal-based power.)

If We had co-invented XML . . .

. . . we might possess the quality of insight Tim Bray offers: Why not deny the enemy the prize he seeks: round-the-clock CNN coverage? It's what would happen naturally if there was an attack every day, which is what many militant muslims would like. At that point European bus bombs would be as newsworthy as Israel bus bombs, or as other vehicular deaths, which killed about 1,500 people every week in 2003 in America and Western Europe. Of course we can't ignore the terrorism story because, as General Gregson says, we admire it so much. But why is it so attractive? What is the compelling difference between death by bus bomb and death by bus? I suggest it's because we're more threatened by intent than reality.

In October of 2002, a couple of snipers terrorized Washington D.C. for a few weeks. It was a great story for the networks, though destructive of everybody else's peace of mind. I suggested then that it reminded me of my first night combat mission near Pleiku, Vietnam 35 years earlier, when a fellow C-130 pilot flew his crew into a large mountain avoiding small bullets. It seemed to me that he did so mostly because he took it so personally that someone was shooting at him:

If you've read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, you know how important it is to a military aviator to be calm and collected. Especially on the radio, you don't dwell on your true state of mind, and you don't waste time on the single UHF channel we all shared. There's even a name for it - radio discipline. When the firing started, though, one of the planes launched into the most remarkable lapse of protocol:

"We're taking fire! We're taking fire!"

"Homey 201, are you declaring an emergency?"

"No, but there's a shitload of AA out here!"

"Homey 201, have you been hit?"

"No, but they're shooting at us! They're everywhere! Anti aircraft fire southwest of the field!"

In other words, this guy was in the same boat as the rest of us. But the stridency of his transmissions was striking, annoying and distracting. I remember thinking that his reaction was way out of proportion to the threat. It seemed that the guy was outraged at the very thought that someone was trying to kill him. Even though I was new on the job, it seemed an absurd way for a combat pilot to react.

Meanwhile, I was peering out the windscreen, trying to tell Howie Lee where the mountains were, but I couldn't see shit. Finally I had a bad feeling. "Howie, everything's black, but there's something big here that's blacker than the rest."

Howie pulled up abruptly and we were thankful as usual for the C-130's amazing performance. Eventually we found the field and got rid of our load. We were able to avoid the hills and the AA on takeoff leg and went home to the stag bar to apply our favorite eraser to the blackboard of life.

Earlier, while maneuvering to land, we had turned down the squadron frequency so we could talk to the tower. By the time we got back in the air, the chatter was totally different. The stressed-out calls were gone, but in addition, the tone of the regular radio calls had changed - the channel seemed subdued. Not enough to comment on - just strange.

When we got back to Cam Ranh Bay, we learned that our alarmed comrade had flown into a large mountain avoiding small bullets.

Do the Math

The D.C. sniper has an entire region hunkered down.

What are the odds any individual person in the area will be shot?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that anyone you know will be affected?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that the Nightly News will tell you anything of real use?

Next to zero.

What are the odds that, if you quiet your mind and attend to the work in front of you - or maybe blog a little - you'll come up with something of surprising value, or do something nice for someone you care about?

Huge.

Our brain - specifically the reticular formation (so-called "reptile brain") is set up to face threats first and only seek opportunities when not threatened. That bias for threat info sells stuff to us. To that end, the media has grabbed and holds our attention, robbing us of the chance to pay attention to something other than the media. The coverage has no content relevant to personal safety. Our obsession with every imaginable "threat" to our person has overwhelmed our ability to maintain our personal compass in the life we really live in. We forget that we're all going to die sometime.

But we're wired this way, so there's little chance we can talk our way out of this silliness, but we may be rescued by technology's steady march from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Broadcasters (a few sources casting broadly) must compete with each other for attention and ad revenue. Narrowcasters (many sources, beaming their message only to the few who tune in) report in a more human voice, uncluttered by inflated threat messages.

The odds are that we'll avoid the mountains and the bullets.

eXquisite Moderating Logic

Military Intelligence – Not always an Oxymoron

If We had co-invented XML . . .