Some highlights regarding the Department of State from the GAO report “Actions Needed to Address Stakeholder Concerns, Improve Interagency Collaboration, and Determine Full Costs Associated with the U.S. Africa Command” (GAO-09-181, 1.4mb PDF, from February 2009)
Continue reading “Quick reference: GAO report notes State staff shortfall, interagency failures
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Tag: department of state
Quoting History: Reorganizing to look busy
We worked hard, but every time we began to function new plans or reorganization were initiated.
I learned later in life that we have a tendency to deal with any new situation by reorganizing. Also I learned what a wonderful method this is to give an illusion of progress while in reality it creates chaos, inefficiency and demoralization.
— Caius Petronius, Roman civil servant of Emperor Nero, died 66AD
It seems that two millennia ago the workforce was also perceived as widgets that will function within whatever structure is available. The truth is, if an organization needs to be “fixed”, changing the organizational chart creates “chaos, inefficiency, and demoralization” today as it did yesterday without a change to the working culture.
Arming for the Second War of Ideas: the Department of Global Affairs
Some suggest the War of Ideas is simply between us and “violent extremists”, “Islamists”, or some other derivative label for Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated movements from the Middle East to South Asia and eastward. There is even proposed legislation that places boundaries on who the adversaries are. However, while some of our policy makers continue to ignore or even reject the importance of information and persuasion in international relations from economics to war, our major competitors do not.
The dean of international relations at the Russian foreign ministry’s Diplomatic Academy said
The Russian government must prepare to fight information wars which are becoming an ever more important part of geopolitical life, restoring parts of the Soviet-era system and going beyond that as well…
The Chinese meanwhile are spending time exploring informatized warfare, “attitude warfare”, “perception warfare”. All of which are fundamentally based on Sun Tzu’s dictum of defeating an enemy without fighting. Unrestricted Warfare will attack the enemy’s strategy and diplomacy, contend for “hearts, minds and morale”, and focus on enemy’s decision-making skills and personal traits.
Interfering with the OODA loop is not new to us, even Hans Morgenthau described the importance of morale and the quality of diplomacy (as did George Kennan in his intentions on containment).
The U.S. is still not armed for the Second War of Ideas, a war we’re already 7-10 years into. To be effective, we need a Department of Non-State, functionally if not bureaucratically, armed with the appropriate tools and comprehensive collaboration across agencies and countries and organizations. But we also need a Department of State as traditional diplomacy is not obsolete. The War Department changed to the Defense Department at the end of World War II and the beginning of the First War of Ideas, maybe it’s time to change the Department of State to the Department of Global Affairs.
Ideas are not confined by geo-political borders, including our own. Myopic and temporally challenged visions of who the enemy is and will be and where and how the struggle takes place must be challenged.
See also:
- Tim Thomas’s Dragon Bytes: Chinese Information-war Theory and Practice from 1995-2003 and, also by Tim, Decoding The Virtual Dragon – Critical Evolutions In The Science And Philosophy Of China’s Information Operations And Military Strategy
- Unrestricted Warfare by Qiao Liang, Wang Xiangsui
- Winning Informatized Wars: The China Report