Shift Happens

I expect most of you suffer the same malady that I do: chronic junk mail “itis”. It is part of the cost of our modern society. Every day, my computer in-box is jammed with almost three hundred unwanted emails that get shunted to my “junk mail box” so that I can approximate some semblance of efficient review and handling of the rest. Every day I delete. Every day it is filled. It has become a ritual. Someone mails it thinking I will read it. I pretend to at least review them, but in fact summarily dump virtually all into oblivion.

In the brief time available to review this unwanted mail, an occasional gem will catch my eye. “Shift Happens” is just such an item. A DVD Created by Karl Fish and modified by Scott McLeod, it takes, in about six minutes, a sobering view of the situation faced by our children and theirs in competition with the newly emerging centers of technology on the other side of the globe.

Mr. Fisch reminds us in the presentation of an array of statistical material of the pre-eminence of Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th Century and the expectation that it was an unassailable pinnacle. Having gotten our attention, he proceeds, backed by some eerie highland violins, to shock us into awareness of our plight:

For every one in a million student in China, there are 1300 just like him. In India there are 1100. The 25% brightest students in China exceed the total population of North America. (That’s 28% for India.) They have more honors students than we have students. China is about to pass the United States as the country with the largest population of English speakers. If we exported all our jobs to China, they could fill all of them and still have a surplus population. In the time it took the DVD to run, 60 babies will be born in the U.S., 244 in China and 351 in India.

The Department of Labor tells us that one out of four of us have been employed by our present employer less than a year, and one out of two has been with their employer less than five years. They cite former governor Riley for the fact that the top ten jobs in 2010 have not been invented yet. In fact an individual starting their technical education today will have the information taught in the first year become obsolete before the end of year three. “We are educating kids for jobs that haven’t been invented yet with information that is outdated to answer questions we don’t even know we have.”

Google processes 2.7 billion queries monthly. The pace of creation of technical information is doubling every two years. To handle the processing of this information, we shipped 47 million computers last year and are fast nearing the ability to ship to the third world fifty to one hundred million $100 computers. By 2013 we should have a computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human mind and by 2023 that computer will cost around $1,000. By 2049 we expect to have a similar cost computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human race.

We send more text messages every day than there are people on earth, and if “My Space” were a country, (106 million users) it would be the 11th largest in the world. The velocity of change is so great that a week’s worth of the New York Times has more new information than an average 18th century Englishman would encounter in a lifetime. We are now close to installation of third generation fiber optic cable that can handle 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls per second or 1900 CDs. That capacity is estimated to double every 6 months for the next twenty years. By 2010 the amount of new technical information is expected to double every 72 hours.

The challenge is stark. The challenge is immediate, and our survival depends on how well we embrace the challenge. The authors note that the government is not even spending half of the 140 million a year on educational innovation that Nintendo spends on research and development. What I get out of that is that it is, never-the-less, being spent. R & D spending by Nintendo and many others is propelling a huge innovation employment market.

One thing is certain; this market will be filled by our children or those who can do the job. Government’s failure to properly fund public education is significant in the risk it poses to our society of social stratification and its accompanying stresses. Our free society is up to solving both the educational and social problems that confront us, but time is passing and our failures to protect our basic values are compounding our challenge. Porous borders, distain for individual responsibility and self absorption are all sapping the national will.

In a recent report to CEO’s by a prominent former senior intelligence official, there is, in our transformation, a ray of hope. They were advised that the restructuring of American business harkens the end of the age of employer and employee. Employment cannot be guaranteed nor the shape of the business itself even a year into the future. We must think like independent contractors. Husbands and wives are economic units making tradeoffs to balance their needs both emotional and financial.

This requires a huge shift in the American economy. The good news is that we are doing it and inventing the only truly 21st century model economy in the process. The bad news is that we are doing it, and it is socially disruptive, painful and is happening at warp speed to compound our social dislocation.

The official makes it clear that our competitors are not supermen by noting the severe unpublicized problems in the transformation of Far Eastern societies and praises our new economy as “fast, flexible, highly productive and unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. “It will,”… increase the gap between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.”

He concludes and I do as well:

“At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China, we are the only country that is continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech weapons are working and which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily.

“There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children. The U. S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the marketplace. We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world.

“Ultimately, it's an issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out.”

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, March 15, 2007; p. 16

Plan B

Back in 2003, writing the first of what is now almost a half dozen articles on the war in Iraq; I noted that although the allies had superior force of arms to prevail, the real question was whether the alliance will have… “The fortitude to persist…to set the seeds for a new political stability in the Middle East. Fortitude in the aftermath of battle will provide a better life for millions of Muslims and Jews alike and leave the rest of the world a safer place.”

I have returned to that theme several times in the intervening years and believe “fortitude” is still the ultimate question. Right now it isn’t looking real good for “fortitude.” The mainstream press would have you believe that the prospects for success are dim and getting dimmer, that little in the way of civil sector improvement has been accomplished, and our military is being sacrificed for no good reason.

Admittedly our past errors have dug a hole upon which the press has composed their defeatist dirge, but in fact there are signs of progress that General Petraeus and his Princeton brain trust can build on. 47 countries have re-established their embassies, the Iraqi military leadership battalions are coming on stream as promised, and recently in a joint operation, the Deputy Secretary of the Health Ministry was arrested for embezzlement of government funds diverted to the Mahdi Militia. This is an important demonstration that the previous protection for Shia members of the government connected to the various militias is no longer in existence. The Iraqi Air Force and Navy are operational as well, and there is hope that armored vehicles, communication equipment and sufficient arms for them to prevail will soon be forthcoming.

With 55,000 trained police officers, Iraq’s 5 police academies are turning out 3500 new officers every 8 weeks. 96% of Iraqis under age 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations and 4.3 million Iraqi children are enrolled in primary school. The civil rebuilding program is going ahead full steam despite the everyday acts of terror. There are more than 1100 building projects including 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities 93 water facilities and 69 electrical facilities and the trend is accelerating not diminishing in the face of the sectarian violence. With determination to win, the war is at a tipping point where it could go either way, but in Washington you couldn’t get a plugged nickel for a bet we will see it through to victory.

While there is hope in Baghdad, in Washington the pressure of a superheated early campaign for president and the partisan blame game virtually assure that some action to lower our exposure before 2008 will be forthcoming. How did a campaign begun in such promise end up this way? It didn’t have to. The anger and angst we feel today is a result of strategic and tactical miscalculation by the Administration that has fueled a political firestorm. The issue is now “competence of the war’s managers,” not WMD and certainly not political doctrine. Regrettably all of us including those living in the Mediterranean Basin will pay for our mistakes.

General Powell is looking increasingly Delphic in his “Pottery Barn” pronouncement that, if we break it, we own it. Well, we do own it. It is now our mess not just this president’s or the Republican Party’s. Powell’s first corollary is not to attack until you can do so in overwhelming force. We were at least 200,000 soldiers short of the force needed to keep control of the ground once it was occupied. To compound our error, once we made it to Baghdad, we sent the old Iraqi Army which, in its lower ranks, was just as much a victim of Sadham, home without purpose, training of any kind and without assets to do anything but cause mayhem.

While praying for our troops and their commander on the ground to overcome the obstacles that confront them, and praying for us here at home for our failure of will and intellect, I feel sure the Administration is quietly planning for “Plan B” in case progress on the ground is not visible by early fall at the latest. What might that be like?

John Chipman, Director General of the International institute for Strategic Studies, (IISS) recently noted that “Great power relations are in a state of flux due to the US not being strong enough to enforce the international agenda it seeks to impose.” You can read that as meaning that the interests of peace and global trade have been set back and global intrigue increased. Mr. Chipman went on to suggest, “US power is strong enough to establish an agenda for international activity, but is too weak effectively to implement that agenda globally.” Conversely, he states, “the power of others, whether states or sub-state actors is strong enough to resist an American agenda, but too weak to shape an internationally attractive alternative or to implement an enduring local agenda free of outside influence.” Mr. Chipman is pessimistic that the troop increase in Baghdad will accomplish its goals, noting that level is well below the new U.S. Army and Marines field manual recommendation of 50 per 1,000 for counter insurgency.

Any “Plan B” needs to start with an increase in authorized permanent troop strength. I suspect existing ceilings and manpower mission limitations had a real hand in the initial mistake that put us in the fix we are in. The President has already requested a permanent increase in the Army and Marines of 92,000. Using the aforesaid manual as a guide and considering the number of National Guard units called up for second tours and regular units extended for second and third tours, I doubt if that is enough for an Iraqi sized problem that might confront us in the future. Whatever the figure is for Plan B, it needs to include prolonged assignment of civil affairs units once the area has been pacified, and these units need enhanced language and cultural training to work effectively in those areas thought to be high risk.

The authorized strength ought to substantially increase special operations troops (our spear point) and the logistics to get them anywhere we need quickly. This “bookends” approach with highly trained special operations troops in sufficient number ready to go, regular troops in sufficient force to sustain its operations and pacify and civil affairs units to speed reconstruction and the creation of local government responsive to local needs, gives us the highest likelihood of a credible force required to meet the shifting needs of today’s battlefield. It also gives us third world credibility sufficient to be an inhibiting factor against terrorism at home or abroad.

As our forces prepare to withdraw from Iraq, we will need to retain an appropriate level of force credibility. Troops in effective unit mass will need to remain in the vicinity. Whether we are talking Qatar, Kuwait, Kazakhstan or shipboard in the Indian Ocean, I am not enough of an expert to judge, but suspect that some mix consistent with force needs and regional politics will drive the answer. To facilitate our troop withdrawal from Iraq, there will need to be a mission change from suppressing the conflict in Baghdad to training and border control that will minimize our weakened force strength and leave the heavy lifting to Iraqis. There is an argument that at some stage of the conflict (critics say we are past this point), our troops become the destabilizing force and should be removed to force the political solution we seek. Effective border security would be just the mission to allow us to depart in an orderly fashion as the cities are pacified by Iraqis.

The issue of how many of our troops remain, I leave for a later day when we will know better the situation in Iraq. The ultimate outcome here has always depended on the Iraqi people. The Sunni bloodbath of Shia following our withdrawal after the first Iraqi War and this war of mutual destruction can only be solved by the contending parties. We can only do the best we can to contain its harmful effects in the region and for our economy. For the future, may I suggest that we mimic Theodore Roosevelt who opined that the policy that was best required the United States to talk softly and carry a big stick.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, March 1, 2007; p. 16
(Titled "Fortitude, The Future of Iraq")