"When I get a little money I buy books..."

For reasons I can't explain, I've been pondering Erasmus lately...

Read

“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

This excerpt, even if the translation abuses the original text a bit, captures some of my own personal pathology when it comes to books. This year, though, the pathology showed an interesting pattern, with surges in subject matter…and a certain amount of consistency in the escape sought from those surges.

The last half of Air War College saw an emphasis on wargaming as I wrestled with the final paper for that program. This blended into reading on Africa as a supplement to and continuation of the Regional and Cultural Studies program in which I was lucky enough to take part. (I say luck because it was far from my first choice, but in retrospect I’m glad and grateful an accident placed me there.) I’ve tried to continue the latter study, but my success there has been mixed, in no small measure because of new surges driven by where I landed following War College, a job driven by surges of “learn all you can about a subject as fast as you can…then change subjects.” This job led from Scales on War—a terrible yet terribly effective book that has displaced Ghost Fleet in the position of worst piece of writing in my recent reading—and the problem of how the Department of Defense invests in close-combat capabilities for the infantry to a brief flirtation with logistics and a longer affair with surprise, revolution, and diffusion of technological, organizational, and social disruptions in the military sphere. Through all that I managed to sneak a few works of fiction—some candy, some extraordinary, and some both—a little (or more than a little) in the way of birding and birdy books, and a bit of serendipity—including the best book I read this year, Jill Lepore’s The Name of War.

In the end, the hit rate on good work was surprisingly high, with some truly fantastic books I’d happily read again or highly recommend to almost anyone (with the caveat that recommendations should always be personal and individual). Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Girl at War, The Name of War, Queen’s Play, and Weapon of Choice, for example, were extraordinary,

I was also lucky to waste time on only a few stinkers with insufficient redeeming value to outweigh the horrors perpetrated, books I’d recommend to no one or recommend only as negative examples– Blindside, Fighting Power, Scales on War, and The Seventh Sense fall into that category. With almost any book, I could find something to criticize, I suppose, but with these I can find almost nothing to praise. Four of fifty-two is a ratio I’ll accept, though.

Think

“Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.”

This, I fear, has been my lot this year, especially since leaving school. I’ve had—or I’ve made and taken—too little opportunity to reflect and to synthesize. I’ve read a great deal, but what have I made of that reading? I’ve been to Africa, moved across the country, begun a new job, suffered some setbacks, and been exposed to a host of new people and ideas…but what have I made of that? I’m possessed of a library of learned books, but what have I learned. Am I lacking in learning? I fear I am. To mangle Thoreau, I’ve eaten many meals at this table, but what have they made me? I’m not certain, and that troubles me. It seems every year I resolve to do better in this regard, to find some balance…and every year I disappoint myself. Perhaps the coming year will be different. Perhaps.

Write

“The desire to write grows with writing.”

Many were the things I wrote this year for school…but the plans to turn those items into publications never came to fruition. Many were the possibilities discussed for writing down ideas important and interesting…but those have yet to happen. Many were the projects proposed for collaboration with people smarter than I…but I’ve mostly let those people down. I did manage to close the read-think-write loop and turn two books read into books reviewed, one nonfiction and one fiction, but that somehow feels like failure. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. A bright spot was #ReadingWomen and the one thing I’m especially glad to have written this year. Now, though, I look at what I’ve read this year in that light, and I wonder if I learned anything at all. Alas.

Looking Ahead

I’m not sure I wish I’d read more, but I do have some regrets about what I read. I was not without thought, but I wish I’d spent more time in reflection than I did. And while I did a bit of worthwhile writing (and am rather pleased with the small part I played in #ReadingWomen), I did not do nearly as much as I expected or should.

Still, there is another year before me, and to borrow a bit of solace from a favorite literary character:

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?“

The Right Answer?

It is strange how serendipity occasionally intervenes to link multiple lines of thinking and the conversations that go along with them and thinking on a subject crystallizes. In June 2014, Harvard Business Review published an article titled "Why Smart People Struggle With Strategy." The piece begins thus:

Strategy is often seen as something really smart people do — those head-of-the-class folks with top-notch academic credentials. But just because these are the folks attracted to strategy doesn't mean they will naturally excel at it. The problem with smart people is that they are used to seeking and finding the right answer; unfortunately, in strategy there is no single right answer to find. Strategy requires making choices about an uncertain future. It is not possible, no matter how much of the ocean you boil, to discover the one right answer. There isn't one. In fact, even after the fact, there is no way to determine that one’s strategy choice was “right,” because there is no way to judge the relative quality of any path against all the paths not actually chosen. There are no double-blind experiments in strategy.

When this crossed my digital desk this week, I was reminded of a slew of recent articles on the Service Academies (here, here, and here) and a great discussion that ensued on The Constant Strategist over the questions raised in the first of the linked articles. Here, two questions matter: What was the crux of the original issue and where have I landed in the overarching questions?

The initial online debate in this exploration centered on the curriculum most appropriate to the education of military officers. What should be the emphasis in a liberal education intended to develop them deliberately? There are two--one might call them adversarial--camps in this debate centered on the relative importance of the sciences and the humanities. I have always found myself standing athwart the apparent chasm between these two positions. As a military analyst with too many graduate degrees in math, I have enormous sympathy for the technical side of this debate (perhaps selfishly, since another position would invalidate much of my education and professional life). But I began my life as a student of English Literature and I spent a formative interlude as a graduate student in military history and strategy, and I know the technocrat's approach to conflict and strategic planning is problematic. But since it is hard to ask that everyone know everything, what is the right answer?

In the end, I think appropriate diversity is the answer, at every unit of analysis from the individual to the population. The trick is to ensure both expertise in the population (i.e., someone somewhere has spent a life studying the topics of interest) and familiarity in individuals (i.e., we have all studied enough of the other that we can speak a common language and seek useful metaphors). That means we should encourage and incentivize both expertise and exposure in a variety of disciplines--math, statistics, physics, chemistry, engineering, history, anthropology, theology, literature, etc. But there's a catch.

In our world of military operations research analysts so well trained in seeking optimality the idea of external familiarity really matters, and this is why I'm writing. There is a distressing and problematic bias in the technical fields toward the existence of a "correct" answer, not unlike the assertion in the Harvard Business Review piece. It's how we're trained. In our education, there exists a provably true answer (at least within the constraints of our axiomatic systems) to most of the textbook questions we answer as we learn our trade. This is, in fact, part of the reason for my own shift once upon a time between literature and math as a chosen field of study. Certainty has a certain comfort and led to fewer arguments between student and teacher.

I do NOT want to encourage anyone to not study the sciences, operations research, or (my own love) mathematics. And I do NOT want to encourage avoidance of the the less technical disciplines. Rather, what I want to encourage is an appreciation of contingency in the application of the technical disciplines and a rigor in the application of the non-technical disciplines, especially the context of militarily relevant questions.

Why? Fundamentally because our models and computational tools are by definition rife with assumptions. What if one or more of those assumptions are wrong? What if we forget some minor idea that turns out to be critical? What if our axioms don't work? (I'm looking at you, Economics.) What if optimality itself is a chimera?

For us, reading history of various kinds and actively considering the question of how our forebears (analytic and otherwise) erred is perhaps a useful remedy. The problem is not that one is smart or not. The problem is how and what one studies and with what intent.

The proverb says, "Iron sharpeneth iron." A suggested circular addendum to this wisdom is that the humanities temper the steel of the sciences while the sciences sharpen the analytic edge of the humanities.