Built-In Stupidity

September 23, 2007 in 4GW, Afghanistan, Iraq, cultures of war, history, strategy, stupid procurement

I don’t think this means what Thomas Barnett thinks it does. He argues that the demand for armoured patrol vehicles in Iraq is an example of conflict between the objectives of his “SysAdmin” force, and the Washington-cented, tech-heavy “Leviathan”. Of course, it’s an example of conflict between the centre and the front line, but that’s not enough.

What if those increasingly baroque MRAPs were themselves a symptom of dysfunctional strategy? Essentially, they are six-wheeled buses surrounded by huge amounts of armour protection of various kinds, intended to be safer for the occupants than the Humvees and trucks they have so far been using. But the enemy is already countering them, by the simple and cheap means of building bigger bombs, or organising attacks with multiple bombs. Given the insane quantities of money it has cost to field what are basically armoured buses, this is not the road to success.

Of course, if you’re a tom in Iraq, you’d rather travel in one of these than in a Humvee. But what mission are they meant to conduct? Building really heavily armoured patrol vehicles implies that you’re going to be driving around in small groups of vehicles full of soldiers a lot, in an environment where you’re under constant IED threat. They’re not suited to use on an active battlefield, and they’re so big they aren’t very airportable. Every artefact is an ideology made manifest; this one manifests the idea that it’s possible to fight this kind of war without contact with your environment. What are the soldiers in the back doing? They can’t see much out of the vehicle; they can’t hear what goes on outside for engine noise; probably no-one in the vehicle would understand what the people are saying anyway.

And we’ve decided to accept this state of affairs, and build a mobile wall to keep it out.

In short, these vehicles are the exact opposite of Barnett’s SysAdmin. What could be more like Leviathan than a column of buttoned-up steel monsters driving 40mph down a crowded street, bashing into parked vehicles, menacing anyone who gets too close with a 25mm chain gun and loudspeaker yelling? In fact, it sounds more like Franz Neumann’s Behemoth than Leviathan; an authoritarian creator of chaos, not order.

Or are they? Think of a bad system administrator; a smelly fat guy who locks himself in the data centre and spends his time being unpleasant to the lusers who ring up and distract him from playing CounterStrike, watching internet porn, and posting one-upmanship troll comments on Windows/Mac flamewar threads. If you’re feeling charitable, maybe he’s borderline autistic. If not, perhaps he’s just an anti-social prick who thinks everyone else is inferior because he knows unix command line arguments and this makes him some sort of Heinleinian/Ayn Rand libertarian hero. Remind you of any geopolitical project you’ve heard of?

If any of this is to have any useful meaning, we need to invest in the human capital; retention bonuses for Intelligence Corps linguists would be a great start. But more importantly, it’s time we got another sysadmin.