This is number 4. Robert Wright cites one of the books that influenced me most strongly. And I comment,
Halberstam’s book is probably the best treatise on organizational behavior you could ever read. Principal-agent problems are everywhere. The problem of whether you can trust an expert is a principal-agent problem, and it is central to many problems that we face today. I think of the game of acquiring status in principal-agent terms, and The Best and the Brightest presents a powerful case study of people who acquired status in the foreign policy world on the basis of connections and adherence to groupthink.
A lack of principled leadership underlies almost all discussion. Fear of needing to be perfect, and a gotcha theme is present in many organizations where jockeying for the next position in the hierarchy is ever present. Admitting a mistake seems to be tantamount to failure with the implication that any mistake means an individual is perceived as not being able to contribute whatsoever in whatever role they are assumed to be in.
In what organization does not a given leader pick those he knows who for the most part will reflect that leaders views and more than likely adhere to the party line?
Ego, and feelings of self worth seem to be at play and admitting mistakes just a greater problem than ever before.
Probably explains a lot why new companies like Amazon vastly exceed old guard companies like Sears. Sears could have adopted new technology to change and adapted be Amazon like before Amazon. However, that concept would never have never be accepted by sears top management. Same goes for Apple, when HP management never thought much of the idea.
Bob Wright is wrong about the lessons. These are not laws of war applicable to all peoples, places, and times, but deficits in the contemporary American government’s capacity to prosecute those wars. Almost all of those “lessons” were untrue even for America itself as recently as WWII, but, alas, not since.
The article seems to be another good example of a pitfall of expertise, which is an excess of intellectual compartmentalization and specialization causing one to miss the forest for the trees.
One is tempted to think about Afghanistan in terms of military capabilities and objectives, terrorism and national security, intelligence and foreign policy, etc.
But that’s different from thinking about the *fiasco* of Afghanistan, and where that fiasco came from, which is not really something best understood through the lenses of war and geopolitics, but instead of a piece with all the other instances of the dramatic collapse in the quality and trustworthiness of American governance and institutions in general. The messy and chaotic pullout is actually not the fiasco worth contemplating, but instead pretty much everything in the 15 years prior.
A person with a more general perspective will see institutional breakdown all over the place. The FDA and almost the entire field of epidemiology have been repeatedly making fools of themselves in public for two years. The media just brazenly lies all the time. The bulk of ‘scholarship’ outside of harder STEM fields is either word-salad bunk, fails to replicate, or is inherently unfalsifiable. Law enforcement is an anarcho-tyrannical disaster of selective prosecution and abuse of discretion. SCOTUS no longer has any clue how or capacity “to say what the law is” using sound jurisprudence.
The military can no longer win wars – its fundamental job.
The CDC can no longer control disease – its fundamental job.
The academy cannot be relied upon to produce truth – its fundamental job.
The border patrol cannot control the border – its fundamental job.
The media can no longer report with integrity or objectivity – its fundamental job.
The police cannot maintain public order, serve, and protect fairly – its fundamental job.
The judiciary cannot administer justice and clarify the law – its fundamental jobs.
Easy to go on with other examples. One of several common threads is the neutralization and disappearance of meaningful and effective systems of accountability, but there are others.
The point is, if one is cognizant of all this, then one should know enough to not look at the nasty experience in Afghanistan as a source of lessons about *war*, but instead as a source of lessons about *ourselves*, our decline, and the general, broad-spectrum breakdown in national capability.
It had only been 20 years since WW2 and barely 10 since the also more successful Korean War, and most of the top personnel had fought in WW2 (e.g. Curtis Lemay used similar air tactics in Vietnam to those he applied in Japan), so it seems doubtful that some drastic change in American institutions or culture in that timeframe explains the difference in outcomes.
In fact, I’d add, a big reason for failure in Vietnam was precisely because the same institutions and individuals that fought WW2 fought in Vietnam and expected fighting it like WW2 would work.
The U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam was the best thing possible for the people of Viet Nam.
Please refute using contemporary data vs. some viable alternative.
+1
Đổi Mới
The earlier that the U.S. can get outta there, the earlier stuff like this can happen.
In other words, f*ck the boomers and their moral grandstanding. Stop looking in the mirror, you vain fools.
I never said it wasn’t. All I said was the reason the US lost wasn’t because changes in institutions or culture.
@Mark Z
You are missing the point. The earlier that the U.S. could officially lose, the better off the average person in Viet Nam was likely to be.
So, how are things going for them from a human flourishing perspective?
Note: my new internet router was manufactured with white glove care in Viet Nam.
That opens up a whole can of worms, but in fact a big thing did change right after WWII, which was precisely that America was indeed no longer willing to pursue wars in the fashion of WWII.
This was for a variety of reasons, but in part of product of the Cold War and the tense structure of the new world order established in the aftermath of the world war. Pursuit of total victory through as much violence as the nation could muster was no longer the objective.
Thornton’s “Odd Man Out” is a good example of how the changed dynamics and thinking led to the Korean War and terrible early management of it. And Fehrenbach’s “This Kind of War” is as good a source as any for explaining how the Korean War was *not* fought at all like WWII, and began what is by now a long tradition of America half-assing it in long wars.
If anything, it was only a brief – and prematurely-arrested – return to the WWII warfighting mentality that saved the American/UN effort from total annihilation. That manner of and approach to warfare was ejected from the American Armed Services when MacArthur was. And if anything Vietnam merely represented the maturation and downstream consequences of the new approach. Per Marx, Afghanistan was the echo of that tragedy in the shape of a farce.