Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

POST: Ivory Tower? Or Glass?

Very nice and sensible comment by Bill Nagle at Small Wars Journal about this "huge" controversy over attribution in the COIN field manual.

The Price piece is priceless: one giant advertisement for why I never went into academia (and no, doing policy stuff out of the Naval War College didn't count), for I'm sure my intelligent retort to something like this would have been, "F--k off, you hopeless pinhead!" And you can only say things like that so often before you lose your job.

To me, Price's comments reflect a fish way out of water--heck, not even in the same universe. That he writes about the "abuse" of anthropology by that all-purpose evil known as the U.S. military tells you everything you need to know about his bias (which is fine, because it's a free world). But his tone in this piece (and, one fears, throughout his work on similar subjects) is completely unhelpful.

When you wage war, whatever the age, you use all the intelligence you can muster. People who step up with this intelligence do so because they believe winning is not only better than losing, it's just plain right--plus it's their duty as citizens to help.

You can disagree with that. Hell, that's what we fight for.

On the smaller point of attribution (and man, is it a small point), Price just doesn't get how these things work. The government can and should steal or plagiarize--or whatever you want to call it--any damn time it wants.

When the government uses my stuff and credits me, I love it.

When the government uses my stuff and doesn't credit me, I love it just as much. Why? Because it means I got through.

Credit is meaningless in this sort of work. The names that go on top are always the highest ranking. Most of the work is done by people never credited. That's how it works. I described such a sausage making proces in PNM: the making of "From the Sea."

Way down at the bottom of the injured parties pile are academics who were ripped off.

This is a small price to pay for effectively changing the way we wage peace so that we do it so much better. Having been to the civil affairs-focused Contingency Operating Location in Manda Bay Kenya this last spring and just this week to a Provincial Reconstruction Team run out of a Forward Operating Base supported by a New Zealand unit in central Afghanistan, I can tell you the change in our military is real.

Al Anbar is a different place today, primarily because of al Qaeda's stupidity. But without the sort of change represented by, and somewhat fueled by, the new COIN field manual, we never would have been able to take advantage of that stupidity by . . . being smarter. As a result of getting smarter, the drawdown of our troops has already begun in Iraq (a Marine expeditionary unit in the west, according to Adm. Fox Fallon, head of CentCom).

This is a very good thing.

Seriously. I am always proud to be ripped off by my government in this way, and I'd be ashamed to write something like Price did.

But the guy is free to have his bias, as am I.

I just don't think we should collectively spend much time on this subject. It is meaningless. Anthropologists can choose to help or not help the military in this long struggle. So can chaplains. So can software engineers. So can political scientists. So can strategic thinkers.

Choosing to help makes you guilty of all sorts of bad stuff in some people's eyes. Again, preserving that right to disagree is a very noble goal.

Earlier this week I stood in Afghanistan's Bamyian valley at the base of the carved-out space in the cliffs where a giant Buddha once stood, a fabulous piece of religious art whose mass attribution is long forgotten by history (we just know they were monks). This Buddha sculpture and two others were blown up by the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban didn't believe in the right to disagree, and they acted on that belief.

In reply to the extremist danger exemplified by this sort of action, I think people can and should choose to aid in the world's defense. I think all sorts of--always subjectively defined--academic precision and intellectual distance should be sacrificed, because I know that preserving what we've got by fighting this sort of enemy will ensure we do the right things consistently over time.

And so I choose to participate in this effort.

You can too, in whatever way you might muster, or you can worry about attribution.

The soldier who gives up his or her life does not worry about attribution, and so I think the rest of us can manage our efforts with minimal fuss--unless, of course, that fuss gets us closer to success. John Nagl openly goes about making a fuss. You may not care for that, but I think it helps the larger cause and so I respect his efforts.

I just don't think this sort of fuss serves any useful purpose, and so I disregard it and think you should too.