I’d been working on a piece on planning and the war in Iraq; the short form is that the demand for a comprehensive Big Plan is, to me, a likely formula for disaster. The reality is that a collection of small plans, combined with a few basic principles is the likely path to success.
I’d been planning on hanging this on Berlin’s ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox.” No, I swear it, and I had no idea that there was just a book released on the subject (Tetlock’s ‘Expert Political Judgment‘), or that Dan Drezner and Kevin Drum would comment on it so intelligently.
Sigh.
Yeah, man, I know the feeling. I was hoping to upstage my turducken-baking neighbors with an impressive hibachi-grill-based smoking device, looking to fog up the windows of a tiny greenhouse on my property; i got excited, thinking that I was close to patenting something I could sell to Phillip Morris fat cats. But it looks like the capitalists beat me to it again:
http://www.blurofinsanity.com/bongdesignpage.html
*sigh*
Of course the obvious direction to go would be scaling up from this grill, but that’d be a hard sell to anyone. Back to the drawing board for the both of us then?
Something people tend not to consider about the pre-war planning is we didn’t want to conquer the country. We didn’t want to make Iraq a colony or client state. Conquering a country is reletivly easy, people have been doing it for millenia without having to worry about insurgencies or whatnot: Just suppress the population with tons of troops (al la the Shinseki plan). But we wanted to conquer a country without being conquerors, and occupy it without becoming occupiers… just long enough to reform another government that can stand on it’s own, and then go home.
That’s something that’s really never been tried before (as Myers has said).
So, it’s not surprising that mistakes were made. What should be suprising is that it’s looking now like we might actually pull it off.
You are quite innovative indeed. No country has ever though about quitting in a war that it was being won by its soldiers.
It is like if Eisenhower had stopped in west shore of the Rhein: “guys that’s enough! Let’s go back to the States”.
Unbelievable.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by a “plan.” The process developed and pioneered by John Warfield, called “Interpretive Structural Modelling” (ISM) has been used extensively by our military. It’s basically about creating a “problematique” or digraph (sort of like a flow chart) of a complex problem based on a series of discussions and voting exercises by the people with principle knowledge and decision making authority. But he won’t even walk into the room to start the process unless everyone on the list of principles is willing to devote at least a week of 10-hour days to it.
In the case of fighting and winning in Iraq it would make sense to have a series of these sessions as we learn more about conducting this sort of operation, so a single rigid plan almost certainly would be a disaster. That, however, should not indict on overall strategic planning process
J, Yea that’s the Murtha plan. I’m wasn’t talking about that, if that’s what you were referring to. Mutha’s plan gives a while new meaning to the phrase ‘quit while you’re ahead’.
bq. I’d been planning on hanging this on Berlin’s ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox.” No, I swear it, and I had no idea that there was just a book released on the subject (Tetlock’s ‘Expert Political Judgment’), or that Dan Drezner and Kevin Drum would comment on it so intelligently.
AL-
Funny, I would have thought that the take-away lesson from “The Hedgehog and the Fox” would be that Big Plans _like the super-amazing transformative paradigm-shifting Iraq War itself_, or your own personal fixation on staying the course, no matter what, were suspect.
And, conversely, that people who demanded small-scale competence at many levels (the budget, troop levels, our image abroad, etc.,) much like Kevin Drum’s consistently done, were perhaps more likely to be trustworthy.
In all seriousness, I find it really hard to take a look at your posts over the past few years, and not come to the conclusion that the Iraq War hasn’t become your “one big thing”. Didn’t you say as much in an email to Drum himself, explaining why you were voting for Bush?
No, I’ll disagree with Chris a bit here.
The investors who were reviewed in Tetlock’s book had a large goal – to make money.
To suggest that we want to defeat radical Islamism as a movement is also a goal – not a plan.
It’s when you talk about the ‘hows’ that you get into planning, and it’s when you have one big, inflexible ‘how’ that you become a hedgehog.
Better?
A.L.
bq. To suggest that we want to defeat radical Islamism as a movement is also a goal – not a plan.
bq. It’s when you talk about the ‘hows’ that you get into planning, and it’s when you have one big, inflexible ‘how’ that you become a hedgehog.
bq. Better?
But isn’t the Iraq War itself a “how”, rather than a goal? The “goal” of defeating radical Islam is damn near universal amongst left and right – it’s the specific way in which we tried to do it that’s divided the country.
And I’d point out that the one thing that’s united yourself, Winds of Change, and virtually all of Bush’s supporters over the past four years has been the insistance that the invasion of Iraq had to go forward, no matter what.
No matter how you slice it, I can’t get around the idea that Iraq is anything other than a “one big thing”. If nothing else, you’d at least have to demonstrate what the anti-Bush people have as their “one big thing” uniting them, but I don’t see any single “how” that fits the bill.