Sunday, February 24, 2013

The Guns of August (reprise)


When I was a high-school sophomore, I was assigned on the basis of standardized testing to Advanced Placement social studies. After suffering for a year—I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate primary resources or to contribute to seminar discussions—I bailed out of AP. Unfortunately, that meant that I had missed the standard Plato-to-NATO narrative of Western Civilization that the mainstream kids had taken in tenth grade. As a result, my knowledge of European history remains spotty to this day. What were the Wars of the Roses all about? Who was Albert Dreyfus, anyway? And when, exactly, was the Italian Risorgimento? I have to look these things up every time.

At about the time I was seceding from Western Civ, Barbara Tuchman was putting the finishing touches on The Guns of August, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1962. I have imagined ever since that the book might offer a painless way of addressing some of the deficiencies resulting from my misspent youth. The Guns of August has been on my reading list for a very long time.

Now, a half-century later, I have done my duty. All in good time. The Guns of August turns out to be an extraordinarily good read, as President Kennedy recognized while it was sitting atop the best-sellers lists fifty years ago. Kennedy gave copies to members of his cabinet and top military advisors. There are those who say that Tuchman’s analysis of the first month of the Great War influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It’s hard to know which of the book’s many virtues Kennedy valued the most, but for me it’s Tuchman’s vivid account of how military goals are routinely undermined by the random blundering and miscommunication that inevitably occur in the fog of war.

For example, Tuchman relates the story of the Goeben and Breslau, two of a handful of German warships that happened to be in the Mediterranean in early August, 1914. When Germany attacked France, the Goeben and Breslau got busy shelling French ports in Northern Africa. The British naturally assumed that the German ships would worry about getting trapped in the Mediterranean and so would make a break for the Strait of Gibraltar and the open seas in the event of a British declaration of war against Germany. And so, when Admiral Milne cabled London to report the position of the German ships at 37.44 North, 7:56 East, Prime Minister Winston Churchill telegraphed back: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” Unfortunately, Tuchman writes, “when reporting their position, Admiral Milne had neglected to say which direction the Goeben and Breslau were steaming. Churchill naturally assumed they were heading west with further evil intent upon the French.”

In fact, the ships were heading east, and so Admiral Milne was halfway between Malta and Greece when he was informed by the Admiralty that Austria had declared war on England. Milne abruptly gave up the chase to avoid an encounter with any Austrian fleet that might emerge from its base in the Adriatic. “Unfortunately the word [i.e., the cable from Admiralty] was an error by a clerk who released the prearranged code telegram for hostilities with Austria by mistake. . . . One more opportunity was lost.” That meant, to make a long story short, that the Goeben and Breslau were now free to proceed to Constantinople, where the Germans negotiated an alliance with Turkey. From there, the German ships moved into the Black Sea, blocking Russian access to the Mediterranean and provoking them into declaring war on Turkey.

Then there were the French, whose military was smitten with the idea that effective warfare consisted of two things: élan, or the will to conquer, and a policy of relentless offense, even to the point of neglecting national defense. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was among those who recognized the absurdity of such a plan of campaign, but “it had to be accepted because there was no time to make another. . . . The momentum of predetermined plans had,” Tuchman concludes, “scored another victory.”

But none of Tuchman’s stories about the futility of master planning is better than the one about the German plan to attack France by sending an enormous army through the heart of Belgium, which was a neutral country whose security was guaranteed by the five Great Powers, including both France and England (not to mention Germany herself!). The great disadvantage of this plan was that it would draw England into the war on the side of Belgium and France. And yet, the Belgian route had been the Germans’ game plan for many years.

And for the Chief of the German General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the predetermined plan was the only thing that mattered. And so, on August 1, 1914, the night before the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm (pictured above), finally recognizing the grave risks inherent in the default plan of attack against France, announced to General Moltke that he wanted him to turn his armies east, initiating a Russo-German war instead. Moltke, we are told by Tuchman, “refused point-blank.”
Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.
Tuchman’s book destroys a number of shibboleths along the way, including the idea, prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century, that free trade had made the leading economies so dependent on one another that major, continent-wide wars had become unsustainable, which meant in turn that 20th-century wars were likely to be short and to turn on a small number of decisive battles. No such luck! Finally, The Guns of August excelled at demonstrating that military men stubbornly refused to appreciate the significance of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means; in other words, they underrated the importance of politics.

In addition to influencing actual decision makers in the Kennedy Administration, The Guns of August profoundly affected the academic study of public policy by shaping the thinking of a young scholar named Graham T. Allison, who came up with a model of decision making based on Tuchman’s insights, one that he posited as an alternative to the notion of unitary states basing policy on a perfectly rational calculation of costs and benefits.

Allison’s Organizational Process model of decision making stressed the importance of pre-established routines in limiting policy options to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Organizations, Allison argued, are “blunt instruments,” which is why they cannot be expected to come up with nuanced policies, and why the decisions taken by their leaders are “frequently anticlimactic” and not necessarily rational in any conventional sense; they are about as rational as the curriculum-planning decisions of a fifteen-year-old.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Role Models in the Public Schools

During the past year or so there has been much hand-wringing over the results of recent international testing that consistently shows the United States to be trailing other advanced countries in measures of educational achievement. Many have noted the exceptional performance of the public schools in Finland, raising the question of why we can't be more like the Finns. The answer, it seems, has more than a little to do with the fact that ours is a far more heterogeneous society, one that tolerates a yawning chasm between rich and poor (as Finland does not), a chasm that reflects extreme inequalities by ethnicity and race. In today's Washington Post, for example, columnist Courtland Milloy reports on the dearth of African-American male teachers and administrators in DC-area public schools. Milloy's profile of Silver Spring's Bakari Ali Haynes (see photo above), is suggestive of all the reasons that African-American students find themselves "at risk" in American public schools. Haynes fils is the son of Leonard L. Haynes III, a U.S. Department of Education official, Ohio State Ph.D., and past recipient of the Glenn School's Excellence in Public Service award. Like father, like son, it would seem.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Broken Branch: Monitoring the Vital Signs


This week, as the Spring 2013 class of John Glenn Fellows digs into the Mann-Ornstein sequel to The Broken Branch, fittingly entitled It's Even Worse Than It Looks, there are glimmers of hope that the national legislature might be in the process of repairing itself.  In today's Washington Post, Paul Kane reports that Congressional committee chairs are fighting for a restoration of "regular order," which is to say that they are seeking to reclaim some of the power they have lost to Congressional party leaders over the past few decades. 

But a few pages later, in the Sunday Opinion section, Dana Milbank demonstrates the power of organized ideologues on the right to turn Lindsay Graham, the intelligent, principled, and scrupulous senior Senator from South Carolina, into "the mad dog of Capitol Hill."  With an eye to the Spring 2014 Republican primary in a red state, it is important for Sen. Graham "to de-emphasize anything that might make him appear to be reasonable," and that certainly would include "his championing of 'Grahamnesty' immigration reforms.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Birth Dearth


Last night a number of us attended a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute.  The speaker was Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard, and his subject was declining fertility rates in the United States and the parade of horribles that inevitably accompanies them.  According to Last, our low birth rates were masked for many years by high rates of immigration.  Since 2008, however, our battered economy has made the U.S. a far less attractive destination for prospective immigrants, meaning that we are falling short of population replacement levels, raising questions about long-term sustainability.

The lecture was fascinating on its own terms, but also because it underscored a number of points made by Eugene Bardach and/or Edward Tufte about how to do policy analysis:  develop a "problem" that involves the co-variation of at least two variables; develop a good causal model that suggests possible "intervention points" (Bardach); make sure that your variables are measurable (Bardach); quantify if possible (Bardach); and ask yourself how big is too big, and how small is too small (Bardach), and "compared with what" (Tufte)--employing international comparisons where possible.  Finally, Mr. Last emphasized the difficulty of projecting policy outcomes and provided a generous account of prospective critics and the grounds on which they might object to his pessimistic ("Negative Nancy") account of the problem.  All in all, it was an exemplary study in policy analysis.

For a link to a video of Mr. Last's lecture, click here.

February 12, 2013 update:  And here's a link to a piece casting doubt on the underpopulation doomsday scenario.  Thank you, Trevor Brown.





Sunday, February 10, 2013

George Will's Man Crush on Sherrod Brown



We spend so much time in our nation's capital complaining about hyper-partisanship and ideological posturing that when our leaders step out of the roles to which caricature has assigned them, we hardly know what to think.  In today's Washington Post, George Will has gone out of his way to compliment Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, and we wonder if the earth has tilted a few degrees on its axis.

In other news, Mark Jacobson, Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, has written in today's Outlook session about "Five Myths about Obama's Drone War."  Jacobson, an Ohio State Ph.D. (military history and strategic studies) and friend of the Washington Academic Internship Program, offers a nuanced perspective on the many facets of drone warfare.  

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Glenn Fellows Visit Old Town Alexandria


In George and Martha Washington's pew box at Christ Church, Alexandria, with docent Eleanor Wilson:  Gabrielle Romberger, Erika Ward, Samanta Franchim, Alissa Belna, Tim Bosserman, and Joe Sadek.  See Joe's commentary here.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz College of Law


In one of my first posts on this blog I observed that easterners are inclined to dismiss midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

"One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools ultimately is not entirely rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).