Atmospherics: Exit The Bubble: QMN053

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Monday, 29 July

(This week’s report is a 12 minute read)

Here’s a quick roundup of this week’s writers:

- Chris Erickson (CME)

- Brady Moore (BJM)

- KS Anthony (KSA)

BLUF: Green Berets are known for being warrior-diplomats who live among an indigenous people in order to accomplish their missions. They use their exposure to the population to be more effective and accurate with their assessments. For civilians, gaining real practical insights and applying them can seem difficult - and we might not even know our assessments are that flawed to begin with. Improving the accuracy of your assessments can be easier than you think - and the trick can be building habits and interactions that fit your daily life 

Brady here. Standing in front of a dusty wall-sized map in late 2005 in West Baghdad with an intelligence officer and a civil affairs officer, the three of us realized the pieces of our intelligence picture didn't fit together. The intelligence summaries we got from higher headquarters weren't matching the debriefs our small unit patrol leaders were giving. Moreover, the local political leaders complained of problems that ran counter to the problems we were tasked to solve. We started to believe that the intelligence picture we’d been given - and which we'd been trained to develop - was faulty, and dangerously leading planning to the wrong operations. Though we had some of the most sophisticated equipment and processes for gathering, analyzing and disseminating information, we were going into the wrong towns on the advice of the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It had to stop.

In 2005 the US military began to re-discover truths about insurgencies and counterinsurgencies it'd long forgotten or even fully ignored. Successful counterinsurgencies from Algeria to Malaya and even Northern Ireland stressed the need to gather what became known as Atmospherics - personal local sentiments about the conflict going on all around us from a political, economic and social perspective. As Counterinsurgency (COIN) theory became COIN doctrine in the coming years US forces began to change their strategies and tactics to ensure that more face-to-face contact and discussion with locals was included in intelligence assessments. These interactions provided a layer of reality and practicality to the whole process - where time and location analysis of improvised explosive device (IED) detonations painted one picture, talking to the local shopkeepers about their concerns and motivations painted another. Once we started regularly talking to those shopkeepers, our intelligence picture became much more accurate. The funny thing was, we were already there in front of their shops every day - what was so hard about walking up a few times a month and having a chat?

In 2011 after leaving nearly a decade in the Army, I read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart which had just been released. In the book he offers a survey that purports to identify whether or not you live in a bubble - meaning a social circle that excludes a lot of the world around us. Murray, knowing that most of his readers would be upper middle to upper class with advanced degrees, designed the survey to prove a point: cultural elites in the US don't know how the rest of America lives nor do they understand why most Americans do the things they do. It identifies things that characterize life for the majority of whites (Murray constrained his study racially for a few reasons) in the US and checks to see how familiar the reader is with them. You come away realizing that you thought you knew a lot about all Americans, but the reality is that you don't- and that creates blind spots.

Being a newly minted civilian with more than a few experiences in foreign conflict, Murray’s points in his book hit me hard. I'd worked with a good cross-section of young to middle aged American men from all over the US, including recent immigrants from Asia and Africa, and I felt like I knew their interests and concerns, but I was coming from a different bubble. Americans then seemed no more focused than they are today on the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan (which was our whole lives), and the 2007 financial crisis only really hit those servicemembers who'd just bought homes. So I was in the middle of moving from one bubble to another - all-volunteer military to upper middle class. It concerned me - maybe I really didn't know what my country looked like, what it did or cared about. It meant the level of understanding I had about my surroundings was low - and most of my life experiences up til that point told me that this isn't good. I read the news, I talked to people on social media- but the counterinsurgency truths about Atmospherics - about having regular face to face interaction with the population - told me that none of this was enough. What could I do to get a better sense of what's happening in my own country?

Not long after reading the book I moved to Northern New Jersey and stumbled upon the answer. Weeks after unloading the moving truck I walked down the street and joined a local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post. At that time it was filled almost completely with Vietnam veterans - men who'd literally inherited the post from their Second World War veteran fathers and who opened the bar every day for members and their friends. They brought me in enthusiastically and before I knew it, I was elected an officer of the post and joined them for monthly meetings, fall and spring cleanups, holiday parties, the annual Memorial Day parade and Super Bowl party. What I began to become regularly exposed to was a group of people outside my social, economic and political bubble. I built relationships with them over draft beers. I attended wakes and funerals for members, talked about chemotherapy with guys undergoing it, and learned about their viewpoints through actual discussion year in and year out. And it began to affect my own viewpoint because it became part of my life.

I never realized it at the time, but I'd actually carried out what Robert Putnam (another political scientist on the other side of the political spectrum from Murray) had recommended in Bowling Alone - reinvesting in local civic organizations in order to bridge the divides we find all over the US today. The interesting thing, for me at least, was how painless it was to do so. I show up to VFW meetings and events because I want to - not because I feel like I have to. They provide not just a sense of community - but real community - actual support when you need it. If you end up in the hospital, the post finds out and contacts your family to see if how they can help. But in the meantime I get to hear from friends outside my bubble what they think and feel and care about - and that means my overall situational awareness about life is better.

The ironic lesson of the success of COIN Atmospherics from 2005-2008 was the simplicity and obviousness of it - all we had to do to improve the accuracy of our assessments was get out of our comfort zone and talk to the people we saw nearly every day on the street and contrast that to what we were seeing in our analysis and news-watching. The lesson of my VFW experience has been the ease of building that outreach into my activities every month. And as far as work is concerned, CI Reichel told us two weeks ago how it can improve your business. The question for any reader is how each person can build a bubble exit into their own activity patterns - and how much better their picture of their surroundings will become. (BJM)

*****

FORTITUDE - FROM RANGERS TO AQUINAS by Chris Erickson

Chris here. The majority of my early adult life was spent as a warfighter, serving in a military that was fighting wars in multiple theaters against an elusive and ever-changing enemy. I voluntarily enlisted in the midst of "The Surge" in Iraq as an infantryman, a job whose entire purpose is to close with, engage, and destroy the individuals that my government has identified as my enemy. It's a demanding job where the stakes around job performance are quite literally life and death, for you and your brothers in arms. Shortly after becoming a junior Non-Commissioned Officer, I rose to the challenge and volunteered for an ever more demanding combat role: a United States Army Special Forces soldier. Since the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001, the soldiers also known as Green Berets have had the highest casualty rate of the entire United States special operations community. Yet, they're still deployed to over 110 different countries at any given time, while also engaging in complex and demanding combat operations in major theaters of war. Clearly, there must be some "secret ingredient" that makes the men I served with so special to earn the coveted Special Forces tab.

One of the consistent "character attributes" that was spoken of with high regard in both the infantry and the Special Forces regiment was fortitude. Specifically, the intestinal fortitude mentioned in the final section of the Ranger Creed: "Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor." In other words, having "the guts" to complete the mission no matter what the cost may end up being, up to and including paying the ultimate sacrifice.

However, this concept is not unique to the 75th Ranger Regiment. As motivated as the Ranger Creed may have been to me as a young soldier (as creeds are designed to do), once of the most impressive and comprehensive works on the topic was written in the 13th century by an Italian Catholic friar. Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest philosopher of all time, wrote extensively on the virtue of fortitude in his masterpiece the 'Summa Theologica.' Despite spending his entire adult life in the religious life, Aquinas is able to write with a definitive authority on fortitude and specifically how it is a virtue for men engaged in combat.

St. Thomas Aquinas states that "it belongs to the virtue of fortitude to guard the will against being withdrawn from the good of reason through fear of bodily evil." He goes on to tell us that "fortitude strengthens a man's mind against the greatest danger, which is that of death...the dangers of death which occur in battle come to man directly on account of some good, because, to wit, he is defending the common good by a just fight." In other words, fortitude gives the fighting man the strength to stare death in the eye without flinching, even "though I be the lone survivor."

Fortitude is the internal strength we find within ourselves when we come up against something that not only seems to be insurmountable, but deadly. Not that it always need be a matter of physical life and death as Aquinas writes; the philosophy of this virtue can be applied, if not truly embodied, in your more mundane day-to-day life. The lessons I learned while training for and executing combat missions against the enemies of the United States may not be directly translatable to my current civilian profession, but I try to find ways to instill those lessons into everything I do, regardless of the stakes. Or, to quote Aquinas again: "A brave man behaves well in the face of danger of any other kind of death; especially since man may be in danger of any kind of death on account of virtue: thus may a man not fail to attend on a sick friend through fear of deadly infection, or not refuse to undertake a journey with some godly object in view through fear of shipwreck or robbers." To put it another way, man with fortitude readily displays "the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission."

"Everything you want is on the other side of fear." This non-Thomist quote by the co-author of the 'Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul' series has been something I have carried with me after my transition out of the Special Forces regiment into the civilian world. The obstacle between myself and fortitude outside of the military has more often been "paralysis through analysis," rather than fear of taking action itself. To call back to the Summa, "He that stands firm against great things will in consequence stand firm against lesser things." He is quick to note that the inverse is not inherently true.

When we train ourselves to cultivate the virtue of fortitude, we build resilience into ourselves and fortify ourselves against the modern leadership traps of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice. It's easy in today's western culture to buy into the lie of action for action's sake, what Josef Pieper called "total work." For if Aquinas is right, and I think he is, "the principal act of fortitude is endurance, that is to stand immovable in the midst of dangers rather than to attack them." Devote yourself to gathering the wisdom of knowing when to act decisively and when to stand firmly against the tides that threaten to sweep you away; this is how you can turn fortitude into right action.

In closing, I'd like to quote another great mind...mostly so I have an excuse to include a quote from the First Avenger in an article full of quotes from the Angelic Doctor: "Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tells you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world, 'No, you move.'" (CME)

*****

BOOK REVIEW: The Culture Code - by KS Anthony

KSA here. There have been a precious few moments in my ongoing education - both formal and otherwise - that stand out as epiphanies. Some of them, like my first contact with Pierre Bourdieu in a sociology course or the first (of many) times I read de Balzac's Père Goriot, evidenced what I've long intuited about the world: that while birthright confers a certain set of assets that one can deploy in various social environments, those assets are still essentially tickets to entropy unless harnessed as capital; i.e., unless they can be used to diversify one's cultural holdings, so to speak, and, in doing so, better - or, at the very least, camouflage - one's position. Others, like my encounter with data manipulation and statistics in a class at Columbia, provided new foundations from which to leverage an understanding of systems that many people find intimidating. Still others came from more visceral instruction: upon taking an elbow to the mouth while sparring in my rougher days, an instructor asked what I had learned. The answer was obvious, at least to me: "Don't let my face be where his elbow is." He concurred. I experienced similar epiphanies while reading Daniel Coyle's excellent The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.

What's best about Coyle's book is that it approaches organizational culture without any of the phony bullshit ascribed to it by fuck-ups and fools who've been promoted to their highest level of incompetence: in short, those most protected from their idiocy and ineptitude by their titles and lack of actual skin in the game. Despite a contemptibly stupid title, Coyle avoids drinking from the latrine of professional platitudes and management maxims that so many business books regurgitate, opting instead for case and research analyses inquiring as to how efficient and dynamic teams optimize their performance, and identifying three key skills:

• Building Safety
• Sharing Vulnerability
• Establishing Purpose

Throughout Culture Code, Coyle succeeds in first and foremost in asking the right questions, either directly or by proxy. For Coyle, all questions worth asking relate back to those three skills and how they serve to effectively connect people. "Cohesion," Coyle writes, "happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection." In a chapter titled "How to Create Cooperation in Small Groups," he cites retired Navy SEAL Team Six operator Dave Cooper, whose understanding of psychological safety as it relates to team efficacy echoes what we've discussed here in past editions. "The problem here is that, as humans, we have an authority bias that's incredibly strong and unconscious-if a superior tells you to do something, by God we tend to follow it, even when it's wrong," Cooper says. "Having one person tell other people what to do is not a reliable way to make good decisions. So how do you create conditions where that doesn't happen, where you develop a hive mind? How do you develop ways to challenge each other, ask the right questions, and never defer to authority? We're trying to create leaders among leaders. And you can't just tell people to do that. You have to create the conditions where they start to do it." One of the prerequisite conditions, of course, is a culture based on organically developed trust.

Coyle's ideas are refreshingly ground-level. He demonstrates an understanding of the importance of language - in how people, especially leaders, communicate their expectations, anxieties, and ideas - in culture building and why openly expressed "exchanges of vulnerability" are so vital to effective organizations. In a passage that William James would undoubtedly agree with, Coyle writes, "Vulnerability doesn't come after trust-it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet."

The Culture Code is a must-read for those in any type of organization. Like TC 31-73 Special Forces Advisor Guide, it's worth re-reading again and again whenever you encounter or enter a new group of people. (KSA)

*****

GEAR RECOMMENDATION: NINJA SUIT

Brady here. I’ve never bought a base layer item of clothing since my first Rapid Fielding Initiative issue in 2003. This is because me and every other soldier got issued Polartec Silkweight Long Underwear - aka the “ninja suit” - aka ECWCS Level I - that magically insulates better than nearly anything I’ve ever tried. These items are extremely durable and don’t hold stink - so I’ve had mine for 16 years and likely will for many to come. Do yourself a favor. 

*****

THE SECRET WEAPON: Partner Nations Look to U.S. Model of Enlisted Leader Empowerment (2 min) “Not all nations empower their enlisted leaders to have the range of responsibilities that NCOs in the U.S. have, CSM Troxell noted, using commissioned officers to do what NCOs should be doing. However, as U.S. forces train with allies and partner nations, they look at the level of trust and responsibility the U.S. military gives to its NCOs, he said. "The more we engage with them, the more they will adopt or mimic what we’re doing because they see how effective it is," he added.” (BJM)

SIGNS OF WEAR: A Navy SEAL Platoon Is Pulled From Iraq Over Misconduct Reports (5 min) “Bradley Strawser, who teaches ethics in war at the Naval Postgraduate School, said the reports of rogue behavior in the SEALs are partly a product of nearly 20 years of constant special-operations warfare. “This kind of slide in the ethical culture, standards, ethos and expectations we have been seeing across the service now for several years is yet another cost of this kind of endless war-fighting,” he said. “Our military desperately needs time to circle the wagons, go deep in working out some of the systemic problems, and effectively right the ship. But it’s very hard to do that when we are literally at never-ending war.” Military regulations forbid the consumption of alcohol in Iraq and Afghanistan, two predominantly Muslim countries. But its presence among American troops serving there is hardly rare, and in many units, including the SEAL teams, leaders sometimes turn a blind eye to moderate use. (BJM)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA), Chris Papasadero (CPP) & Brady Moore (BJM)