Searching for the Secretary of Everything Else
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 6:34AM ARTICLE: 3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar': Bush Seeks Overseer For Iraq, Afghanistan, By Peter Baker and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post April 11, 2007; Page A01
Wow! Can it get any more obvious?
The White House begging retired 4-stars to assume a "war czar" role that will focus on winning the peace and--apparently, given all rejections to date--be anything but a czar (our skill at picking oxymoronic names knows no bounds).
The obvious goal?
Somebody to supersede and transcend the obviously under-powered, unambitious, overwhelmed and wholly dysfunctional interagency leadership process currently mismanaged by a senior National Security Council staff member (as anonymous as they come), whose departure, along with just-finished strategic reviews, is the declared bureaucratic trigger for the search.
Yeah, right!
But just as clear as the administration's desperation to get some unity of action across Defense, State, and USAID through unity of command in some new SECEVELSE, is its continuing unwillingness to really invest this putative "czar" with any real power (thus, the turn-downs).
Bush wants the "man on the white horse" (Iraq-the-System-Perturbation continues to roil our system almost as much as the Middle East), but hasn't made the leap of logic to the full department.
But look at how the pain drives movement to the obvious conclusion?
Pascuel, who ran the first wee little office in State that OSD launched across the Potomac cynically (Feith) a while back in a transparent and futile attempt to toss that tar baby in somebody else's lap, says the search for a man isn't the answer, fixing the bad policy is.
Well, duh!
But the search for the man is really only the tip-of-the-iceberg expression of the growing bureaucratic impulse to create a funding/power center of gravity in the system to transcend the clearly broken IA process, which the president owns second-hand through the NSC, which in this administration remains weak to Cheney's Veep (by design).
Why this search can come to no good end, of course, is because Cheney's power remains just enough intact to convince those being asked to take on the job to realize it's a doomed position.
Still, it's stunning to see the administration reach so baldly for this inevitable fix.
DoEE is coming all right, right on schedule--the schedule of failure and pain and political desperation.
Yes, yes, the SysAdmin force/function is a pipe dream all right--until you recognize the nightmare won't end without it.
Reader Comments (8)
1. Anthony Zinni
2. Weslet Clark
Either case Deputy; Thomas Barnett
SysAdmin is a "war"-fighting philosophy which is very different than conventional military doctrine. This is why people are skeptical of the Dutch approach in Afghanistan.
A great example of SysAdmin can be found in the section of the book "Fiasco" called "Petraeus jumps through a window of opportunity." This section tells of three things that he did in 2003 in Mosul:
1. He changed how detainees were handled by removing degrading and "pointless" parts (ie. blindfolds).
2. When he heard of the rumor that US night vision goggles could see through women's clothing, he organized an event where local Sheiks could try the equipment themselves. This first gathering then became a regular event. These meetings translated to less violence around Mosul, intelligence and most importantly, respect.
3. When he discovered that an Iraqi banking official had managed to keep a large supply of money from being looted, he concocted an order (with an improvised seal), in lieu of one from Baghdad, that granted the man the authority to pay people their pensions and salaries.
THAT is SysAdmin, folks.
It is a large contrast to the General described in the next section (Gen. Hogg) who was goaded by lone insurgents with morters into firing counter-battery artillery into people houses.
(Sun Tzu talked about a characteristic of a commander called the "Moral Law" by which people in armies are led [possibly to their death], it is NOT called the "Power Law").
This early success by Petraeus (who had carefully studies the lessons of Vietnam) was dependent on his quick actions. He did not allow a vacuum of power to be created. Now that Iraq has descended into violence, a good SysAdmin approach is less workable. The violence will probably have to run its course. But if there had been more people with using this doctrine in 2003, things would probably not be nearly as bad today.
For a normal Adminitration, the obvious goal would be to work the interagengy process until it begins making larger contributions to the war efforts. And for a normal Administration, retired four-stars would be lining up for a chance to get back in the game.
But this isn't a normal Administration.
In this particular case, the obvious goal is to find a scapegoat for the failure. Hence the difficulty in finding someone willing to kick the tar-baby.
One more key aspect--whoever it is must have the ability to build his own team bringing folks from outside and rapidly. The biggest killer of progress and motivation is the need to first convert the current insiders, sort out who will support and who needs to leave immediately. It take an enormous amount of time and take much energy away from the original task (got that tshirt). That leader can be leveraged dramatically with a small team he can trust to weed people out, enlist the willing talent, and provide brutally frank feedback to him right from the start.
Perhaps the word maestro is better than czar--one who is expert at pulling people together into a team, and who can orchestrate broad, multifaceted operations on many fronts and levels all at once.
Great comment.
Off-line, I take some heat for praising the Dutch.
Your analysis is superior in this regard, but we have to think of allies like this (being realistic on evolution):
1) come as you have (subtext: I like having the world's biggest gun)
2) come when you can (anti-Bush: you don't have to show up for war to be valuable)
3) evolve as fast as you can but no faster.
Building the SysAdmin function is a huge coalitional handholding ex. Effectively, we need to rebrand entire militaries, so I take my modelled behavior and growth where I can.
So cool to be patient, but cool also to keep stating requirement in maximal terms.
Actually, Homeland Security wouldn't even bother me if it weren't too clumsy to do anything positive about terrorism and too focused on terrorism to do anything about any other threats to our safety (bird flu, asteroids, natural disasters. . .).