…in a life far far away, I started in an extramural Masters programme at Waikato. The programme folded after the first year but in that year, my output was a paper examining aspects of ‘Future War‘, inspired by Martin van Crefeld’s ‘On Future War’. Looking back, it is a bit disjointed and has some unfinished ‘lines of inquiry’ ever since I have been meaning to rewrite and expand on it but it’s always been on the ‘gunner’ list…

Anyway, somewhere in the Blogdom in the last couple of weeks I came across an entry questioning ‘resource wars’ as a valid description of the conflicts we will be facing in the next few years. I thought at the time of writing that paper and still do that this description is somewhat narrow, shallow even and is not indicative of its inventor actually applying much grey matter to the question. We are not entering a new era of conflict, we are there now have been been for some time, probably since Gulf 1. Conflicts since 1991 are not over questions of resource but could be better described as ‘me, me, me’ wars – it’s all about self-interest as the driving force behind them whether the waved flag is religious, haves v have-nots, historical or over resource, to rattle off but a few…

It continues to amuse me that these pundits still try to present where we are now as something new when it is in effect as old as the hills (read Alexander’s sitreps from Aghanistan!)…

Final shots on metrics…it was at the back of my mind last night but the penny only dropped this morning when I found my MP3 player and starting to listen to Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope on the drive to work (45 minutes each way each day so where I get a lot of my ‘reading’ down – go Audible.com!). In Chap 3, he is discussing what it means to be a politician and juggle promises, commitments, family and conscience – he concludes that politics is not like building a house, with a clear and rigid plan (the metrics world) but more an ongoing conversation with shifting alliances, changing priorities and fickle supporters – sound more like our world??

Last night we were watching the Politically Incorrect Parenting Show (if you don’t have this overseas, it should be on the TVNZ site somewhere for download – well worth a watch) which is bloody funny and and all the more funnier because it is so damn true – everything you really needed to know about bringing up children before the nice (metrics!!) people took over…the bottom line last night was ‘make your child’s problem, THEIR problem – not your problem‘ and this is probably just as true for COIN as it is for child-rearing. We can apply all the resources we like, feel their needs and their pain, and move amongst the people as a fish through the sea (blah, blah, blah) but it all means nothing if the people aren’t prepared, ready and/or willing to grip up their own problems. It is all too easy to start a COIN/Stability campaign and wake up one morning stuck in the middle of a cargo cult where you are expected to solve all ills, ailments, blights and other problems AND deal to the bad people.

Many years ago (decades) I got a brief on how Guatemala, Guyana or some other country beginning with G addressed their insurgency problem, using a big map, some coloured pins and relevant effects:

• If your village was a ‘green‘ village, then you got active support from the security forces and government, access to aid programmes and life was generally pretty good.
• If your village was an ‘orange’village, then you got a bit of sporadic aid, but more checkpoints, shakedowns, etc but you knew how to raise your status from fence-sitting bet-hedger to ‘green’.
• If your village had a ‘red‘ village, then look out – relocations, wells filled into, overt and aggressive security force presence, the whole nine yards of COIN uncool stuff BUT there were ways of moving up the colour spectrum if you really found all this a bit onerous and sought a quieter life.

The point is that is not often if at all you ever get anywhere by being nice and empathic with everyone – in fact nanny-stating is probably a pretty good general recipe for disaster, failure, plague, fire, pestilence and other bad things. It simple just doesn’t work – sometimes you really do have to be cruel to be kind and let your child/failing nation make some decisions for itself and actually commit to a path…

Someone sent me an interesting article the other day suggesting a similar strategy for Afghanistan, based upon a protection racket where possibly the people have to choose between the lesser of evils for progress to occur. This needs to be in a more substantial form than just rolling out to vote because that on it’s own will achieve little – the insurgents will still be there and like criminals, may not be particularly worried that they have been voted (technically) out of existence – they might actually find it somewhat amusing as they plan and prepare their next attack….in the end it is all about action and willpower…

Parting shot today – interesting to note how Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt has dropped his ‘baby-killer’ chant from Vietnam War days and become a ‘puppy-killer’ . Invercargill has the highest proportion (by heaps) of euthanised dogs in NZ and this tosser’s council has just killed off six Rottweiler puppies because they MIGHT become aggressive when they grow – this after the SPCA committed to homing them. As a dog and a Rottweiler owner, I think this sucks big time – upbringing and training define how a dog behaves….so much for all those kudos you earned during Dancing With the Stars, Tim…

First up, big cheers to Phil for organising sport this arvo: no one lost a limb and the woodshed is now looking way healthier…

I’m pretty much over Tosser-Nissan-pickup Guy from this morning so taking up from then, I now know what pingbacks do – found out when I revisited the COIN Blog entry on metrics that I linked to below and found that through the magic of pingbacks this blog is now listed in that blog…and I was just talking to Josh re six degrees of separation, global networking etc. He also brought out a good point re blogs and stuff in that maybe we should be looking at using them for adult (no, not that kind of adult stuff – out of the gutter, all of you!!!)   show and tell a couple of mornings each week to stimulate discussion and perhaps feedback that discussion back into the blog (maybe more on this on The Strategist). I really do get the impression that many people are quite shy about commenting on a blog…whereas I’ve always been a bit short on shame (or so I’m told)…

Anyway…metrics…I hate them…balanced scorecards…I hate them too…I’m not anti trying to do things smarter, not at all, but I am totally anti any attempt to try to beancountise things that can not be easily quantified, more so when, IMHO, what this is really doing is saying to those professionals who are involved that “…we don’t really trust (understand) you unless you can convert what you do (or say you do) into a nice little spreadsheet preferably with good use of colour…” Sometimes you just have to and should trust to the experience of others – which then  implies that what we should be doing is whatever needs to be done to make sure that that experience contributes to an accurate (as possible) SUBJECTIVE assessment.

If you look across the staff branches (or one variation on the theme anyway) from 0-9, (0=comd/coord and includes legal probably because no one else will have them; 2 = intel; 3 = ops; 4 = log; 5 = plans or civ-mil affairs, works either way for this argument; 6 = comms/CIS; 7 = training; 8 = conepts and evaluation; 9 = finance/resources),  some lend themselves to quantifiablity (1, 4, 6, 9 perhaps) and others (0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8?) to qualifiable judgements (based on training and experience). In the end it all comes down to the professional opinion of the guy in charge, and that’s something the beancounting/BI community need to get their heads around.

That now out of my system for now, on lighter note, partly due to crap TV programming at the moment, we are rerunning Band of Brothers at home again – Carmen’s idea and I’d just like to say how cool it is to have a wife who is interested in such things; and a daughter as well: I was some proud and impressed when Tash watched Blackhawk Down, asked a few questions and then disappeared with the book to read up on it herself – and then did the same for Pearl Harbor after the lame-as 2001 movie…so off to watch Masterchef (love some of the food ideas they have), followed after the news by Fair Go, the child psych guy and then it’s off to Normandy for a couple more episodes….