In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious. -Blaise Pascal, 1670
Donald Rumsfeld, as Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton pointed out, in almost Johnsonian matched cadences, has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally, and tactically.
And, one might add, spiritually. From what shallow brackish lake of empathy does the "arrogant and abusive" browbeating of inferiors come? --Or, say, conceptually. The idea that thinking in terms of "superiors" and "inferiors" is the way to get people to help you do hard, important work?
Despising other people, as we recall from health class, causes headaches, neuritis and neuralgia, ulcers, hypertension, heart trouble, and dimming bloodshot eyes. It doesn't make the people you despise feel very good, either.
This is no Culture of Life. Clearly, the man in the sharp suit with the bad breath does not believe there is a gnat's eye's worth of difference between Living and Not. Living thing or stone, both respond to a swift kick.
No, this is the Culture of the Hard-Assed, the Tradition of Tough, the Heart of Stone, practiced by Saints Patton and MacArthur, Archbishop Wayne and Reverend Eastwood. We didn't win the Big One by being careful of one another's feelings, I can guaran-doublegoddamn-tee you that.
"Rumsfeld's tough, sure. But that's what's you need in time of war."
Or maybe not. Seems some softness crept its way into even the great ones of the Greatest Generation. Seems Winston S. Blood-Toil-Tears-and-Sweat Churchill himself, darling of neocons who seem never to have read him, harbored a heart that bled:
I cannot say that we never differed, but a kind of understanding grew up between me and the British Chiefs of Staff that we should convince and persuade rather than try to overrule each other.
You know who was tough? McNamara. He kept the generals away from LBJ, so they couldn't dilute with doubt the purity of the Plan.
For it's the Plan, man--the Plan is what it's all about. First there is the Theory, which begets the Plan, which begets by iron logic the Sacred Course--the one we must stay. Go the Distance, whispered in ghostly tones down the polished halls of the Pentagon. Stay the Course.
You listen to Rumsfeld, it's like hearing Coach Bob Knight. Who you gonna believe, me or your momma? Me or your lying eyes? Damn right---me. I got the Plan! Stay true to the Plan, things will be fine, and if we don't, hell will be ours to pay.
The Plan was where McNamara went suicidally wrong, for all he was so self-secure, flinty-eyed and hard-assed behind those no-nonsense glasses. In chart after excruciating chart he detailed how the Plan (in his case, a thing called PPBS--Planning-Programming-Budgeting System) had every problem worked out before it even had a chance to arise. The Plan! Built on the Unassailable Analysis, backed by the One True Theory.
Trouble is, the goddamn thing didn't work. The Plan failed, as Aaron Wildavsky wrote, "everywhere and at all times." People didn't behave as they were supposed to. Enlisted men fragged their officers. The stinking gooks, fer gawdsake, instead of surrendering in the face of superior firepower, against the unquenchable blazing fire of napalm, in the face of holy Rolling B-52 Thunder, actually fought harder!
They would not admit defeat, no matter how we beat them. They did not play according to the rules of the Plan. It must be, reasoned the Secretary of Defense, because some people did not pursue the Plan hard enough. Otherwise, things would be as things are supposed to be. Be would be the finale of seem.
Let us for a moment take a detour into a little gray-matter work. The danger, in regarding people as quantities, objects that obey like inanimate things the physical laws of force and power, lurks in the difference between kinds of entropy.
Entropy in the physical world means things run down. Chaos threatens every order, and to sustain order, energy must be expended. We have to work to hold back the night. And Rumsfeld, thinking all things to be mere things, works hard. Overtime. You can doubt his judgment, General Richard Myers says, but no one should doubt how hard he works, as he daily rages against the dying of the light, the entropy that threatens the Plan with frostbite and eternal night.
But Rummy, bless him, has it backwards. Living things---and by that we mean people, here--require some entropy. Otherwise order overwhelms them, stops them dead in their deterministic tracks. A little rise in temperature here, a little scarcity there, an unexpected troop movement over there, and the entirely ordered living thing has no way of adapting. Circumstance can do him in.
As that grand theorist of war, Clausewitz, put it, the clumsy Rumsfelds of the world think "exclusively [of] physical qualities, whereas all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects."
Informational negentropy, old dears, is the irresistible and irreversible eating-up of flexibility, of necessary entropy. It is the loss of alternative. It is the rigor mortis of the Plan. The map slowly becomes the territory.
By that time, you hear secretaries of defense for putatively large and powerful nations making noises that sound a lot like, "I'm right, and you...you are free to disagree, but I'm still right. Says so right here, in the Plan."
And then, kiddos, as the soldiers say, it's time to kiss your ass goodbye. Game over.
Barbara Tuchman writes that purity of devotion to the Plan, the blind Staying on Course leads
to the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and the more involved in it the sponsor's ego, the more unacceptable is disengagement.
Before long, as Henry Kissinger later wrote,
The military [finds] themselves designing weapons on the basis of abstract criteria, carrying out strategies in which they [do] not really believe, and ultimately conducting a war they [do] not understand.
As the noose tightens, the principals grow lonelier, less trustful. The press, the public, the carping generals, are just too foolish to see the majesty of the Plan!
When you're management and everyone--I mean everyone-- else is labor...not so good. But only if you want to succeed.