A-Rod wins the MVP award. While they got it right, I nevertheless find it troubling that a excellent defensive third basemen having a clearly superior offensive season barely defeated a poor fielding DH (to the extent that such a thing is possible).
I find this map fascinating. I’m not surprised by the general support for Ortiz around the country, but it’s very odd that A-Rod won Missouri, of all places.
Hey, I’ve been there. I don’t remember seeing any extraordinary renditions…
The National Court has received a prosecutor’s report on allegations that the CIA used an airport on the Spanish island of Mallorca for a program of covert transfers of terror suspects, court officials said Monday.
The chief prosecutor for the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca, submitted the 114-page report to the court in July, after a four-month investigation prompted by articles in a Mallorca newspaper, the court officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because court rules bar them from giving their names.
The newspaper, Diario de Mallorca, said Spanish police have identified three planes used by the CIA at the airport in Palma, the capital of the Mediterranean island, in its ”extraordinary rendition” program, in which terror suspects were transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible ill-treatment.
The office of the prosecutor, Bartomeu Barcelo, declined to comment on the report on Monday, as did police in Mallorca.
I think it’s great that we don’t even tell our allies about the people we’re moving through their territory in order to torture. It’s wonderful when we can present them with little surprises like this.
I recently mentioned Stuart Taylor’s latest collection of evidence-free assertions that Alito is a moderate, which is no better than his terrible Newsweek article. Some of the problems are familiar. The bulk of the column discusses some of his decisions in order to debunk the most implausible claims made about them, often skipping the most important arguments (for example, he completely ignores the critical facial challenge issue pending in Ayotte when discussing Casey.) But even if one agrees with his assessment of the cases, he still wants to have it both ways. If you want to say that he was doing nothing but applying the law and the fact that he generally seems to arrive at the most conservative plausible result is just a coincidence, fine, but you can’t turn around and argue that these cases demonstrate his moderation. Either he’s mechanically applying precedent or he’s not. If he is appointed to the Supreme Court, he’ll no longer be bound by these precedents. Anyway, this is already well-trodden ground.
The two big conceptual problems with his defense, however, seem to come up a lot, so it’s worth saying a little more about why they’re wrong. Taylor’s primary fallacy is his claim that Alito “will try as hard as anyone — and far harder than O’Connor — to be intellectually honest and analytically rigorous, and to keep his political preferences out of his legal rulings,” and is therefore a moderate. But this is, of course, a non-sequitur. The most “analytically rigorous” and “intellectually honest”—the most internally consistent–member of the current Court is Clarence Thomas, its most conservative member. Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum Stevens and Ginsburg are far more principled and rigorous than the more moderate Breyer. Alito’s “intellectual honesty” tells us nothing about the content of his legal philosophy. (And this is obvious with the comparison to O’Connor, far less principled and also far more moderate than Thomas.) Taylor argues, without seeming to notice the magnitude of the concession he’s making, that “Alito will probably be to the left of Antonin Scalia, albeit with less of a libertarian streak.” But, of course, that “albeit” is everything; Scalia’s libertarianism means that he will sometimes agree with liberals on civil liberties cases; it’s the same as arguing that Alito will be worse for liberals than Scalia. Similarly, Scalia’s textualism and Thomas’ originalism have sometimes caused them to vote against the business interests Alito has supported so slavishly. Perhaps Alito will be more liberal in some other area of law to counterbalance this–but if Taylor knows what that is, he’s keeping it to himself. The fact that Alito is more incrementalist–in the sense of being less theoretical than Scalia and Thomas–can make him more conservative in some cases, and Taylor is wrong to conflate incrementalism with ideological moderation.
The other strawman erected by Taylor is his assertion that “[t]he notion of an apolitical justice may seem preposterous to academics and journalists who see judges as politicians in black robes, and view their opinions and citations as camouflage for preconceived ideological agendas.” Taylor at least spares us Ann Althouse’s claim that liberals don’t believe that people have rights. But he engages in a similar false dichotomy. To say that judges will have discretion in deciding cases, and will tend to resolve these ambiguities in ways that are congenial to their policy, moral, and/or theoretical preferences is not to say that judges are merely “politicians in robes” or that law is crudely reducible to politics. Nobody says that Alito was a bad faith judge trying to nullify upper court precedents, and nobody says that he will, say, read capital gains tax cuts into the 6th Amendment. But when he has discretion, he has been remarkably consistent about reaching conservative results–and on the Supreme Court, where he is no longer bound by precedent and virtually all cases have more than one reasonable outcome by definition, his discretion will expand considerably. This doesn’t mean that he’s intellectually dishonest; it just means that he’s philosophically conservative. Taylor, like many of Alito’s defenders, simply can’t understand that people may oppose Alito without thinking he’s a hack or inept.
And what’s remarkable is that Taylor doesn’t really dispute the countervailing evidence that Alito is very conservative:
It’s true that Alito has been readier than many judges to deny jury trials to civil-rights plaintiffs whose claims he considers weak. And some responsible critics argue that in his zeal to protect employers from unwarranted lawsuits, Alito may have stretched the law to make it unduly hard for victims of discrimination to prove their cases. The Senate should explore this.It should also explore liberal analysts’ concerns that in split decisions, Alito has taken the conservative side so consistently as to suggest ideological rigidity.
Yes, he’s demonstrated his “zeal” with anti-plaintiff rulings so draconian as to provoke zealous disagreement to the tune of 10-1 by a 3CA en banc and 9-0 by the Supreme Court. But what disingenuous buck-passing this is. We don’t need to wait for the Senate–why don’t you tell us if you think the scholars who have studied his dissents are wrong? And, of course, what we’re going to find out about this at these post-Borkian hearings is nothing–do you think he’s going to say that he plans to overturn unpopular precedents and make it extraordinarily difficult for discrimination plaintiffs to sue? Please. Taylor is unwilling to engage with the claims that Alito is as or more conservative as Scalia or Thomas, which makes sense because he doesn’t have any evidence.
Like many of Alito’s apologists, Taylor asks us to take Alito’s moderation on faith. In Taylor’s case, however, his imprimatur is if anything a negative, particularly when he’s extolling the virtues of formalist judging. In a 2004 column Taylor defended that well-known example of principled formalist jurisprudence Bush v. Gore, claiming that “[w]hile its legal analysis was sound, I wonder whether it would have been wiser for the justices to punt the 2000 election brawl to Congress.” This is an inversion of Richard Posner’s argument that while the decision was obviously both internally and externally unprincipled, it was pragmatically justified by the fact that it brought closure to an otherwise chaotic situation. The difference is that Posner’s argument is something that is rationally defensible. (Taylor also uses such well-worn techniques of the decision’s tiny number of defenders as claiming that Souter filed a “partial concurrence,” which is sort of like a “partial pregnancy.” Either you concur or you don’t; Souter didn’t.) Anyway, I’ll listen to Taylor’s lectures about intellectual honesty and the law when I start listening to lectures about accounting transparency from Ken Lay, and his arguments about Alito carry no weight unless he can actually produce some evidence about his fabled moderation.
…some classic Tayloresque non-sequiturs in the Moonie Times article Atrios cites. Given a statement he wrote saying that “I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion,” what’s the response?
A leading Republican involved in the nomination process insisted that this does not prove Judge Alito, if confirmed to the Supreme Court, will overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion a constitutional right.
“No, it proves no such thing,” said the Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In fact, if you look at some of the quotes of his former law clerks, they don’t believe that he’ll overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Judge Alito sided with abortion proponents in three of four rulings during his 15 years as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, usually based on existing law and technical legal issues rather than the right to abortion itself.
Ah, OK, so we now have a clear statement that he said that he thinks Roe should be overturned. But, on the other hand some of his former clerks–who, of course, could not have any interest in seeing him appointed to the Court–have made some assertions (which probably used the phrase “judicial restraint.”) And even the MT understands that his willingness to follow binding precdents as an appeals court judge is irrelevant to what he’ll do on the Court. Ack.
Barring some unequivocal repudiation at the hearings, any Democrat who votes for Alito should be a pariah.
Several bloggers have noted the extremely important change in practices with respect to civil rights enforcement at the DOJ. To repeat a point I made before, for the most part it’s true that the major programs of the New Deal and Great Society are safe even under single-party Republican rule. When it comes to Social Security, where the government just sends out checks, this is enough. But legislation like the Civil Rights Act (and the Clean Air Act) requires significant resources and mobilization to enforce. The executive branch has a huge impact on how such legislation is applied on the ground, and it is possible to gut the legislation without actually repealing it.
And, of course, this is what’s important about Alito’s hostility to plaintiffs in civil rights and other discrimination cases. Conservertarians have a perfect pincer movement that allows progressive legislation to stay on the books, but 1)doesn’t provide the resources to enforce it, and 2)makes it harder for individuals to mobilize the laws themselves. It’s very important to be clear about what’s at stake, in both elections and Supreme Court appointments.
Professor B has a very thoughtful partial defense of Maureen Dowd, and raises a lot of good points. I certainly don’t want to deny that internalized sexism could have affected the content and tone of my arguments. And certainly I agree that to the extent that criticisms of Dowd are criticisms of using personal narratives as part of a political analysis, this is quite wrong.
I should, however, make clear that the superficial and sloppy cultural analysis that I admittedly couldn’t resist making fun of isn’t why I think her column is so pernicious. If that was all she wrote, she would be annoying but harmless, a non-libertarian Tierney who can actually write. The problem with her column is much bigger. You may recall that the 2000 election was quite important, resulting in a ruinous war, massive deficits that will hamstring progressive initiatives for decades, widening inequality, and the federal courts packed with Neoconfederate cranks (among many other things.) You may also recall that, remarkably enough, at the time this monumentally important election was generally portrayed as essentially meaningless, a contest between “Gush and Bore” hahaha. And you may remember that Al Gore was relentlessly portrayed in negative terms, and many of the stories spread about him were not, in fact, true. It is remarkable that with possibility of a thoroughly incompetent reactionary taking office, the media was having interminable discussions about “earth tones” and terrible Ali McGraw movies, but that’s what happened.
Well, you know who was one of the most egregious offenders, from the base of the liberalNewYorkTimes? Maureen Dowd. Oh, yes, she’s turned her vacuous snark on Bush now. But when he was busy being elected, Dowd was lying about Gore’s fundraising, peddling the “invented the internet” and “summer chores” lies, accusing Gore of flip-flopping with no evidence, writing idiotic pop-psych nonsense including the “earth tones” crap, discussing Hillary Clinton’s haircuts, spreading the “Alpha Male” meme, attacking Gore for having the temerity to discuss actual issues in a Presidential campaign, and on and on and on. (And any feminist defense of Dowd should explain her attacks of Gore in re Naomi Wolf’s salary. Anybody think she would comment on the salary of a political consultant if said consultant had a penis?) And she didn’t just repeat the empty cliches and lies of others. She actually created some: Dowd invented the bullshit Love Story smear. The Bush presidency that Dowd started decrying when it was too late to do anything about it came about in no small part because large parts of the media covered an election for President of the United States in a manner that might be appropriate for a junior high student council election. And Dowd was one of the worst offenders. Making the personal into the political is a valuable form of analysis. But for Dowd, the “personal” consists of crude cliches, and there’s essentially no “politics” at all. While her colleague Paul Krugman was pointing out little details like the fact that Bush was outright lying about his fiscal policies during the debates, Dowd was repeating a bunch of memes that were 1)generally made up out of whole cloth, and 2)would be utterly irrelevant to anything if they were true.
So when it comes to my dislike for Dowd’s column, whatever else I’m wrong about I stand behind it. I wouldn’t give her a pass for her egregious hackwork in the 2000 campaign any more than I would give one to Chris Matthews, and I don’t think her columns are any better now that her substance-free hackwork is directed against the administration she did her best to help put in office.
…welcome new readers! My most substantive post on the underlying debate can be found here.
Interesting article in Friday’s Washington Post on what may be some developments in US counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq. Some in Congress have taken this article by Andrew Krepinevich seriously, and are pressing the Army to modify its practices. My thoughts on Krepinevich’s plan are here.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) added his voice to those calling for a new focus. He said the emphasis up to now on rooting out insurgent strongholds through widespread, short-duration raids — what he termed “sweeping and leaving” — is not working.“Rather than focusing on killing and capturing insurgents, we should emphasize protecting the local population, creating secure areas where insurgents find it difficult to operate,” the senator said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He added that such an approach would require more troops and resources, arguing against the idea of reducing U.S. forces in Iraq next year.
The persistent ability of enemy groups to move fighters around the country — eluding raids or replenishing their ranks after taking casualties — has put pressure on the Pentagon to demonstrate that U.S. tactics are effective. U.S. commanders have acknowledged a measure of frustration at needing to send forces back to some cities and towns where insurgents had returned after being chased out months earlier. But they insist progress is being made.
They also say they already are pursuing a version of the strategy advocated by McCain and other critics. Indeed, for months now, senior officers at the U.S. military command in Baghdad have been using the term “clear and hold” as a shorthand description of their counterinsurgency strategy. The same term was applied by Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr. to his Vietnam pacification strategy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which followed the “search and destroy” campaign of his predecessor, Gen. William C. Westmoreland.
It’s all well and good that the Army is making some changes, but I remain skeptical. For example, this
But in practice, critics say, U.S. forces have tended to place more emphasis on clearing than holding. And senior officers and administration officials conceded in interviews this week that the holding aspect has received less attention, in large part because of a shortage of available troops.
U.S. commanders have avoided seeking more American forces for such defensive missions, waiting instead for additional Iraqi military and police forces to emerge from training. With those personnel now exceeding 211,000, the shortage is easing, officials said.
“The difference now is, we have Iraqi forces that can do the holding,” said a senior administration official involved in policymaking on Iraq. “We didn’t want to use U.S. forces to do a lot of the holding because it gave the impression of occupation.”
reveals a basic misunderstanding of the relationship between clear and hold operations. I’m not surprised that the Army prefers to do the clearing and leave the holding to Iraqi forces, but that’s really not how it’s supposed to work. Holding is critical to being able to clear, because holding creates stable areas and friendly locals who supply counter-insurgent forces with intelligence. In other words, the forces that do the holding will have the greatest capabilities for clearing. A situation in which clearing and holding are the responsibilities of separate units are likely to be a lot less efficient. Also, part of the point of an oil spot strategy is not so much to destroy enemy insurgents in their hideouts as to force them to attack friendly targets at bad odds.
Finally, the focus of the Army on clearing doesn’t really get to the main problem with current US doctrine, which is that it just doesn’t have a good sense of how important holding is. It still wants to hand that operation off to someone, anyone, who can do it. The excuse that “we don’t want to make this look like an occupation” is absurd and embarrassing. Also, given the focus on the Syrian border, I’m still unconvinced that the Army is prepared to accept that the centers of supply and support for the Iraqi insurgency are inside Iraq, just as the center of gravity for the Viet Cong was its supply network in South Vietnam rather than the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In fairness to the Army, the politics of the Iraqi occupation make an internal focus difficult; the Administration seems committed to the notion that whatever problems exist are the result of foreign fighters and Syrian influence.
All that said, this is probably a positive development. Counter-insurgency wars can be won, even by foreign occupiers. I’m skeptical about this one, but, if the battle is going to continue into the forseeable future (and I suspect that it will), we might as well use the best tactics available.
Courtesy of OPFOR.
Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) was the third battleship commissioned by the Italian Navy. When built she was a respectably armed unit, 24000 tons, 13 12″ guns in three triple and two twin turrets, and could make 22 knots. Like most Italian battleships, Giulio Cesare had relatively light armor.
The job of the Italian Navy in World War I was to counter the Austrian Navy. The Regina Maria did this job very well; the Austrian Navy left port once, and lost a battleship in its brief foray. The job of watching a fleet that never leaves port is not an exciting one, however, and Giulio Cesare had an uneventful war. Her sister, Leonardo Da Vinci, was blown up by Austrian frogmen in 1916. Her sole mission before World War II was to bombard the Greek island of Corfu during a diplomatic dispute.
The Washington Naval Treaty prevented most of the great powers from building new battleships during the interwar period. So, instead of new construction, most countries rebuilt old ships. In some cases the changes were minor; most US battleships lost their cage masts, for example. The Japanese, never quite satisfied, reconstructed many of their battleships twice. The British put off the reconstruction too long, and went into the war with several ships (such as the battlecruiser Hood) unmodified from their original form.
Giulio Cesare went through a process that was less reconstruction than full transformation. After a four year modernization process, she emerged as a 29000 ton unit, carrying 10 13″ guns in two twin and two triple turrets, and capable of making 28 knots. The speed increase in particularly turned Giulio Cesare into a useful and dangerous unit, although her light armor continued to make confrontations with enemy battleships a dangerous proposition.
The problem of the Italian Navy in World War II had less to do with the ships than with the management. Whereas the Italians ought to have challenged the Royal Navy for control of the Mediterranean (especially given the British commitments in the Atlantic and the Pacific), the fleet rarely left port, a fact that the Royal Navy took advantage of on November 11, 1940, when the aircraft of a single light carrier devastated the Italian naval anchorage at Taranto. Giulio Cesare escaped damage, but her sister Cavour was sunk, and several other ships were damaged.
Giulio Cesare ran convoy escort missions until 1942, when the Italian Navy withdrew her from active operations because of increasing Allied dominance in the Mediterranean. Again, this was a poor decision, as greater pressure on the Allies in the Med could have helped the Axis war effort in other areas. Following the Italian surrender in September of 1943, Giulio Cesare and several other battleships surrendered to the Royal Navy at Malta, where the ships remained until the end of the war.
Giulio Cesare was returned to Italy following the war. The Allied terms were relatively merciful. The Soviets, however, were less interested in accomodation. In 1948, Giulio Cesare was transferred, as war reparations, to the Soviet Union. In a 
few short months she went from being the obsolete relic of a defeated second rate navy to being the flagship of the Soviet Black Sea fleet. Giulio Cesare became Novorossiysk, the most powerful Russian ship in the Black Sea since World War I. Imagine the delight of her new captain, who likely previously served either on a small cruiser or on one of the antiquated and largely non-functional battleships of the Baltic fleet, upon taking command of Novorossiysk and bringing her to speed at the head of the (modest) Black Sea fleet. I suspect that he may have imagined bringing her into battle with the only other major naval unit located in the Black Sea, the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz.
In late October 1955, Novorossiysk exploded and sank at anchor in Sevastopol. The cause remains unclear. Most likely, a magnetic mine dropped by Germany during World War II attached itself to the bottom of her hull and exploded. 608 Russian crewmen died, largely because of the ineptitude of the Soviet captain who thought that she would settle on the bottom rather than capsize. Other theories of Novorossiysk’s end persist, however. One suggests that an Italian special forces team attached explosives to the ship and blew it up out of revenge. It is rumored that several Italian frogmen received high decorations for mysterious reasons in the lat 1950s. Another theory suggests that the Italians planted explosives in the ship upon the transfer, although why they would set the timer for seven years escapes me. Finally, one theory suggests that Soviet intelligence blew the ship up with the purpose of blaming Turkey for the tragedy and sparking a war. The the sinking was concealed from the world puts this explanation into question, of course.
As Jane says, a special hall of infamy should be erected to house the five “Democrats” who voted to strip habeas corpus rights, preferably in shackles:
Kent Conrad – North Dakota
Joe Lieberman – William F. Buckley
Mary Landrieu – Louisiana
Ben Nelson – Nebraska
Ron Wyden – Oregon
A very familiar group of names. We have 3 Senators from reactionary states. Then we have Joe Lieberman, whose representation in the Senate from a state that could actually elect someone who doesn’t frequently cast abominable votes remains intolerable. And then we have Ron Wyden, who I would not necessarily expect this from, which is the most dismaying of all.
…and remember that it’s not just non-citizens–the Judiciary Committee as about to hold its second hearings on the gutting habeas corpus Streamlined Procedures Act.
Is it more evident among our political pundits or our sports pundits? How many times have we heard this since the beginning of the BCS system?
Team X and Team Y are undefeated and stand atop the BCS standings, but Team Z is also undefeated. How can you say that X and Y are deserving to play in the championship game but not Z? Here are reasons A,B, and C for why Team Z should be playing for the title, regardless of what those durned (computers/strength of schedule evaluators/AP voters/USA Today voters) say. If a team from this conference is once again denied a spot in the big game, then the representatives of the (SEC/Pac-10/Big-10/Big-12) are going to storm the barricades in the offseason.
Yeah.
There is only one way to determine a genuine national champion in college football, and that is a playoff. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows that any scheme designed to produce a single legitimate champion through the bowl system is going to leave some teams unhappy. It doesn’t matter how much you fiddle with the BCS formula. It doesn’t matter, really, even if you include a “+1″ game, although that would help a bit. A playoff is the only thing that solves the problem. I-AA does it, Division II does it, Division III does it, and the NAIA does it.
This is hardly the most critical question facing the Republic, and I sympathize with the guys at ESPN who have to hold off an angry mob of Alabama fans by declaring that hey, maybe Alabama really IS better than USC, and who in any case have to fill up many hours of programming. But let’s not dance around the question when any four year old could identify the problem and the solution.
In a post with rather more protein than wisdom, Jeff Goldstein accuses Kevin Drum of “lying by omission” because while Drum claimed that Reynolds was attacking the patriotism of “Democrats” Reynolds was just resorting to the first refuge of the wanker where “Democratic politicians” are concerned. As Drum says, this is silly (particularly since given Reynolds’ logic, in which criticizing the President’s selling of the war is ipso facto unpatriotic, his argument would not in any way seem to be confined to Democratic politicians.) It’s also hilarious to see Goldstein accusing people of “begging the question,” given that, of course, his claim that people who criticize Bush’s claims that Iraq was a serious threat to give biological or nuclear weapons [it was nowhere close to acquiring] to terrorists [it had no working relationship with] must be arguing in bad faith is a rather definitive example of begging the question (I take no position, however, on whether this question-begging is”writ large.”) Goldstein’s projections of bad faith require the assumptions that 1)available intelligence unambiguously suggested that Iraq had this kind of weapons capacity (which is utterly false) and 2)The central claim of Bush’s speech, that Democratic politicians had access to the same intelligence to Bush (also utterly false.) Bush’s claims that Iraq presented a significant security threat were, in fact, highly contestable as of March 2003, and in fact many people did contest them in real time. Goldstein is welcome to disagree with this assessment, but to smear the patriotism of people who believe that Bush was not presenting the evidence accurately (a claim that, of course, been proven right in retrospect) is disgraceful.
And moreover, there is no reason to interpret Reynolds charitably. Goldstein lies by omission by leaving out the fact that Reynolds is on the record as believing that large numbers of American liberals are anti-American traitors. He has, of course, claimed that an obscure college professor of no discernible influence who called 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns” represents “the very image” of the “Left,” which is a “seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy.” (Also note that he calls a speech by Ted Kennedy “borderline-traitorous,” which blows his assertion that he only uses McCarthyite smears against politicians who changed positions about the wisdom of the war right out of the water.) He has claimed that many Democrats “are actively rooting for the other side,” based on an ad placed by something called the “St. Petersburg Democratic Club” (as opposed to, say, some official apparatus of the Democratic Party, or something or somebody that might reflect the views of anybody but the tiny number of cranks involved.) He has also claimed that preserving Saddam Hussein is the “top priority of the left.” The last quote is particularly telling, because it reflects his belief, consistently expressed, that opposition to the war could not possibly have been based on a conception of the American national interest, or on a cost-benefit analysis in terms of democracy promotion, but reflected some latent sympathy for a brutal dictator. And this claim is, of course, appalling nonsense.
I guess I can’t really blame Reynolds for engaging in these McCarthyite smears; he’ll get hooted on by people like Goldstein, and if I were him I wouldn’t want to defend the claim that the evidence that Iraq was a security threat to the United States in 2003 was as unambiguous as Bush said on the merits either. But these smears are reprehensible, Drum was entirely correct to call him out on it, and (perhaps optimistically) I expect better of Goldstein than to applaud them while attributing bad faith to people who disagree with him.
…UPDATE: Josh Marshall has an excellent summary of Bush’s false claims, large and small, about the war.
A few years ago Anthony Cordesman coined the phrase “Buffy Paradigm“. The Buffy paradigm is a way of approaching foreign policy and national security problems that mirrors the environment faced by Buffy and the Scoobies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Buffy paradigm refers to a situation in which we can expect that our expertise, preparation, and areas of competence will NOT accurately reflect that threats that we face. This places a premium on flexibility in action and preparation.
In the context of this interview, my Defense Statecraft students and I have begun thinking about the “MacGyver Paradigm”. The MacGyver paradigm refers to a military posture and training program that emphasizes flexibility, low level initiative, inventiveness, and minimal reliance on technology. MacGyver, as all thinking people know, could build a Formula One racecar out of tape, gum, and bits of wire. The MacGyver paradigm is about military organizations that rely very heavily on the human/intellectual capital side of the effectiveness equation, such that individual soldiers and units are flexible and capable enough to accomplish any number of different tasks, often with minimal support.
What sort of organizations pursue the MacGyver paradigm? Well, I think that the MacGyver paradigm more or less covers what Major General Grosvenor was trying to get at in his discussion of flexibility in the British Army. The United Kingdom is one of the few countries that can actually afford to pursue the reforms associated with the Revolution in Military Affairs. The British Army, however, has been reluctant to adopt technological fixes to problems because it believes that increasing technology, even communications technology, cuts down on the flexibility of forces and the initiative of officers and men. We might appropriately term such beliefs “MacGyver-esque”.
With the possible exception of Special Forces units, the United States military has pursued and continues to pursue policies at odds with the MacGyver Paradigm. It has been persuasively argued that RMA reforms will have the result of placing more tactical and operational responsibility in the hands of senior officers and of reducing the ability of junior officers to react to new situations. In this sense, the closer we get to Future Combat Systems,
the farther we get away from MacGyver. I suspect, given the threats that the Army is likely to deal with in the near to medium future, that this will be a bad thing.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
