Games of chance prey on this neural system. Consider, for example, the slot machine. You put in a coin and pull the lever. The reels start to whirr. Eventually, the machine settles on its verdict. Chances are you lost money.
But think about the slot machine from the perspective of your dopamine neurons. Whenever you win some money, the reward activates those brain cells intent on anticipating future rewards. These neurons want to predict the patterns inside the machine, to decode the logic of luck.
Yet here's the catch: slot machines can't be solved. They use random number generators to determine their payout. There are no patterns to decipher. There is only a little microchip, churning out arbitrary digits.
At this point, our dopamine neurons should just turn themselves off: the slot machine is a waste of mental energy. But this isn't what happens. Instead of getting bored by the haphazard payouts, our dopamine neurons become obsessed. The random rewards of gambling are much more seductive than a more predictable reward cycle. When we pull the lever and win some money, we experience a potent rush of pleasurable dopamine precisely because the reward was so unexpected. The clanging coins and flashing lights are like a surprising squirt of juice. The end result is that we are transfixed by the slot machine, riveted by the fickle nature of its payouts.
The mistake both authors and publishers of business books make is to confuse a book about “what I did” with a book about “how to do it”. Whether you are successful because you are skilful or successful because you are lucky, you can easily, and mistakenly, convince yourself that your own experience shows that anyone can do it.
The best refutation of this argument that I've seen in a long time is contained in a new book, "The Persistence of Poverty," by a friend of mine, Charles "Buddy" Karelis, a professor at George Washington University. Karelis isn't an economist or social welfare expert but a philosopher by profession with wide-ranging curiosity, a dry wit and a weakness for unconventional wisdom. And after doing lots of reading and giving it extensive thought, Karelis concluded that the reason some people are perpetually poor is that they don't have enough money.
Industrializing Africa is the only way to solve its poverty. The industrialization of coastal China — accompanied by declining public health provision, a neglect of agriculture, and environmental degradation — ultimately transformed the lives of the Chinese.
Before the Industrial Revolution all societies were caught in the same Malthusian Trap that imprisons Africa today. Living standards stagnated because any improvement caused births to exceed deaths. The resulting population growth, pressing on fixed land resources, inevitably pushed incomes back down to subsistence.
Here is a fun problem from the book: Consider an NxN square grid made up of 1x1 unit squares. Now take away from this grid two corner squares from diagonally opposite corners. The resulting board, which is now a square with two notches, has NxN-2 unit squares. You are then given dominoes with dimensions of 2x1. For what N can you completely cover the board with these dominoes?
Recent research on the relationship between capital punishment and homicide has created a consensus among most economists who have studied the issue that capital punishment deters murder. Early studies from the 1970s and 1980s reached conflicting results. However, recent studies have exploited better data and more sophisticated statistical techniques.
The Economics of CrimeThe creation of the new State has placed a tremendous responsibility on the citizens of Pakistan. It gives them an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how can a nation, containing many elements, live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens, irrespective of caste or creed.
Our object should be peace within and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial and friendly relations with our immediate neighbors and with the world at large. We have no aggressive designs against any one. We stand by the United Nations Charter and will gladly make our full contribution to the peace and prosperity of the world.
The terms of the mosque debate vary widely: in the United States, mosque projects often meet practical objections, to do with “zoning”, water supplies or parking, but they are usually overcome, helped by a legal system that protects all faiths. In southern European countries like Spain and Italy—where attachment to Catholic symbolism is strong—people are much blunter about expressing their objections in cultural terms: this is a Christian land, and mosques have no place here.
In Rome, on August 21st, police halted work at a site on the Esquiline hill, in an area with a high immigrant population. The sponsors of a planned mosque there were found to have begun work without seeking permission from the local authority. The new building was to have gone up just a few metres from a Catholic church; for some, that was the most important point. A spokesman for a new far-right movement, La Destra, called it “an insult to Christian culture”.
Reza Aslan, a Californian writer on Islam, says that to his American eyes the intensity of openly “Islamophobic” opposition to mosques in parts of Europe, especially the south, is a shock. “It's as though some Europeans are confused about their identity and are now trying to construct one in opposition to Islam.”
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According to The Fiji Times, the Samoa National Olympic Committee recently lifted a ban on gay sex for athletes competing in the upcoming South Pacific Games in August. The memo was published last week and encouraged members not to "embarrass yourself, your family and your country by trying this in the village—[because] it's against the law of God." Committee President Tapasu Leung Wei tried to explain away the statement by saying that the rules represented an "internal memo" not meant to be published, and maintained that Samoa "treats everybody as equal" (New Zealand Herald). But homosexuality is illegal under Samoan law, with penalties for indecency of up to five years in jail. Gay activist Roger To'otooali said that "if [the SNOC] wants to ban sex than they should ban all sexual activity, regardless of sexual orientation."
David Warsh is a former journalist for the Boston Globe. For reasons that are beyond me, he has taken an extraordinary interest in the workings of academic economics. Presently, he publishes an excellent on-line newsletter, Economic Principals which is a must-read for economics academics.
I also harbor a Hippocratic Oath; an economist, other things equal, should do no harm; in formulating the odds and stating the main reasons behind them, he should come clean on the uncertainties.-Paul Samuelson
At GMU we have a large PhD program --- approximately 200 students enrolled in the PhD program at various stages of completion. Each year we get about 200 applications, and we admit roughly 50. Funding is very limited. In the comments at that Freakonomics blog it is stated that to get into a top PhD program it requires a GPA of 3.7 or higher, a 800 on the GRE quantitative (or near that), extensive undergraduate math background, already existing research experience, and 3 letters of recommendation from well-known economists strongly supporting your case...
At first a student reading that might say that is insane, but it actually makes sense given what I know of our own program at GMU. To be admitted to our program this year you needed the following:
GPA -- 3.55; GRE Quantitative -- 770; GRE Verbal -- 610. To receive funding you needed a much stronger record. The only offsetting factor to these competitive scores is letters of recommendation from professors that are known to the staff and willing to push their student in our unique areas of strength at GMU (Austrian economics, experimental economics, law and economics, public choice, and religion and economics). Still a student cannot be significantly under those baseline scores and get admitted to the program, and the opportunities for funding from the department are non-existent if you are under those scores (though there maybe some private funding).
"To my son, I leave the pleasure of earning a living, which he had not done in 35 years."-Wills of the Rich and Vengeful
"To my daughter, I leave $1,000. She will need it. The only good piece of business her husband ever did was to marry her."
"To my valet I leave the clothes he has been stealing from me regularly for the past 10 years. Also my fur coat that he wore last winter when I was in Palm Beach."
"To my chauffeur, I leave my cars. He almost ruined them and I want him to have the satisfaction of finishing the job."
"To my wife: She has been troubled with one old fool, she should not think of marrying a second." ...
Just today, Queen of Mean Leona Helmsley cut off two of her grandchildren and left a $12 million trust fund to her dog, Trouble, whose body 'when he goes to the kennel in the sky' will lie beside her in a mausoleum.
The late wife of billionaire hotelier Harry Helmsley also left millions for her brother, Alvin Rosenthal, when she checked out. Rosenthal was responsible for caring for Helmsley's beloved white Maltese. The other two grandchildren were spared her final wrath and left $5 million each providing they visit their father's grave at least once a year.
The dirt-hating Helmsley ordered that the mausoleum be "washed or steam-cleaned at least once a year," for which she left $3 million.
Helmsley also remembered the "little people" in her life and threw her chauffeur a bone - $100,000.
Dr. Lagoda said a rust fungus threatened the Japanese pear, a cross between pears and apples. But one irradiated tree had a branch that showed resistance. He said the Japanese cloned it, successfully started a new crop and with the financial rewards “paid for 30 years of research.”
The payoff was even bigger in Europe, where scientists fired gamma rays at barley to produce Golden Promise, a mutant variety with high yields and improved malting. After its debut in 1967, brewers in Ireland and Britain made it into premium beer and whiskey. It still finds wide use.
“The secret,” reads a recent advertisement for a single malt Scotch whiskey costing $49.99 a bottle, is “the continued use of finest Golden Promise barley and the insistence on oak sherry casks from Spain.”
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At the beginning of each class, I will usually distribute copies of the notes that I will project on the screen during that class. But these notes are only an outline. In order to study for the course effectively, you should plan to add your own comments in the margins of the notes I distribute or elsewhere. If your notes aren't very good, borrow notes from your classmates and copy them. (This is NOT cheating.) Unfortunately, studying from other people's notes is never as good as studying from your own. Finally, never try to memorize your notes; instead, use them to help you understand the material.
Q: To what degree is Playboy’s circulation decline a magazine issue versus a pornography issue (i.e., the digital revolution has hurt most magazines’ circulation and advertising prospects while also greatly increasing the supply of pornography)?
A: It’s a magazine publishing issue. We’re not going to kill ourselves by supporting what is widely acknowledged as a broken newsstand system, so we manage our rate-base accordingly. Please keep in mind that, because of advertiser sensitivity, Playboy relies enormously on generated revenue from subscriptions and single-copy sales. That makes us unique among most magazines, and it’s something we’re thankful about when the magazine industry ad pendulum swings in the wrong direction. It gives us something to hang on during such challenging times for magazines as now (particularly in the men’s category: FHM folded; Maxim has new ownership, and Stuff has been folded into it).
So what to do? We know our brand is stronger than ever; we’re reaching more consumers than ever through our various media platforms. We’re aware of the changes in how and where media is consumed today, and we’re well-poised to take advantage of that. Last year we combined the publishing and online groups, and we’ve increased the overall audience for Playboy. Our goal is to continue effectively aggregating that audience for our advertising partners. Our free site has a large portion of material from the magazine, and we’re discussing ways of extending even more content online. The challenge for the magazine industry is in figuring out ways to adopt metrics that go beyond what’s shown on the ABC and MRI statements.
I’m so sick of being held up to our circulation spike in the 1970s. The world was much different then. All magazines had higher circulations. Cable TV and the Internet did not exist; VCRs were in their infancy. Look at CBS then, and look at CBS now. But even in this niche market, CBS and Playboy are pretty damn big. And here’s the thing: thanks to our early arrival on the Web (Playboy was the first magazine with a Web site, launched in 1994), our combined audience is bigger than ever. We’re offering Playboy-style content on advertiser-supported and paid subscription sites, and the combined advertising revenue year over year is up.
Today, magazines exist in a universe of expanded entertainment choices for men. Even in the magazine universe alone, the competition is intense — there are a lot of magazines out there! And now we’re competing with free and pirated material online. It’s a transitional period, and we’re certainly one company with the resources and product to ride it out.
"I want to tell you the story of a crossing from 52-year-old man to 55-year-old woman, Donald to Deirdre.
"A strange story," you say.
Yes, it's strange statistically. All the instruments agree that what's usually called "transsexuality," crossing the gender boundary, is rare. (The Latin in "transsexuality" makes it sound sexual, which is mistaken; or medical, which is misleading; or scientific, which is silly. I'll use plain English - "crossing.") Only three in 10,000 want to cross the boundary of gender, a few of them in your own city neighborhood or small town. Gender crossing is no threat to male-female sex ratios or the role of women or the stability of the dollar. Most people are content with their birth gender.
"I came to the Bank because I always wanted to work for the Bank"
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Late in the 1880s, long before the institution of the Federal Reserve, Eastern savers and Western borrowers teamed up to inflate the value of cropland in the Great Plains. Gimmicky mortgages — pay interest and only interest for the first two years! — and loose talk of a new era in rainfall beguiled the borrowers. High yields on Western mortgages enticed the lenders. But the climate of Kansas and Nebraska reverted to parched, and the drought-stricken debtors trudged back East or to the West Coast in wagons emblazoned, “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” To the creditors went the farms.
Every crackup is the same, yet every one is different. Today’s troubles are unusual not because the losses have been felt so far from the corner of Broad and Wall, or because our lenders are unprecedentedly reckless. The panics of the second half of the 19th century were trans-Atlantic affairs, while the debt abuses of the 1920s anticipated the most dubious lending practices of 2006. Our crisis will go down in history for different reasons.
One is the sheer size of the debt in which people have belatedly lost faith. The issuance of one kind of mortgage-backed structure — collateralized debt obligations — alone runs to $1 trillion. The shocking fragility of recently issued debt is another singular feature of the 2007 downturn — alarming numbers of defaults despite high employment and reasonably strong economic growth. Hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities would, by now, have had to be recalled if Wall Street did business as Detroit does.
Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, in the 1940 edition of their seminal volume “Security Analysis,” held that the acid test of a bond or a mortgage issuer is its ability to discharge its financial obligations “under conditions of depression rather than prosperity.” Today’s mortgage market can’t seem to weather prosperity.
A third remarkable aspect of the summer’s troubles is the speed with which the world’s central banks have felt it necessary to intervene. Bear in mind that when the Federal Reserve cut its discount rate on Aug. 17 — a move intended to restore confidence and restart the machinery of lending and borrowing — the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen just 8.25 percent from its record high. The Fed has so far refused to reduce the federal funds rate, the main interest rate it fixes, but it has all but begged the banks to avail themselves of the dollars they need through the slightly unconventional means of borrowing at the discount window — that is, from the Fed itself.
What could account for the weakness of our credit markets? Why does the Fed feel the need to intervene at the drop of a market? The reasons have to do with an idea set firmly in place in the 1930s and expanded at every crisis up to the present. This is the notion that, while the risks inherent in the business of lending and borrowing should be finally borne by the public, the profits of that line of work should mainly accrue to the lenders and borrowers.
This does not mean that the Fed should follow the advice of Andrew Mellon, the treasury secretary, after the 1929 crash: “liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, and liquidate real estate...It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” America's output fell by 30% as the Fed sat on its hands. As a scholar of the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, the Fed's chairman, will not make that mistake. Central banks must stop recessions from turning into deep depressions. But it may be wrong to prevent them altogether.
Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February....
Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes...
“It’s fear,” he said. “Lack of services. You see, if you have a security problem, you don’t need a lot to frighten people.”
But China is more like a teenage smoker with emphysema. The costs of pollution have mounted well before it is ready to curtail economic development.
Is there some new magic formula for success? Generals David Petraeus and James Amos argue that there is. They have laid out a counterinsurgency doctrine. (December 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual). But it is not new. When tried in Vietnam, it did not work. As Petraeus and Amos admit, the key element in insurgency is political: “each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.” Is this a feasible objective for foreigners? One searches the historical record in vain for an example of success. The foreign occupying force, by definition, is alien. Vietnam showed that even when the aliens (us) had a numerous and established local ally (the South Vietnamese government) that ally was more apt to be alienated by its association with the foreign military force than that force was to be “Vietnamized” by their native ally. In sum, the single absolutely necessary ingredient in counterinsurgency is extremely unlikely ever to be available to foreigners.
Perhaps no doctrinal manual in the history of the Army has been so eagerly anticipated and so well received as Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. It is designed both to help the Army and Marine Corps prepare for the next counterinsurgency campaign and to make substantive contributions to the national efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most important contribution of the manual is likely to be its role as a catalyst in the process of making the Army and Marine Corps more effective learning organizations that are better able to adapt to the rapidly changing nature of modern counterinsurgency campaigns. The most notable section of the manual is probably the Zen-like “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency” in the first Chapter on page 47. These capture the often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency. The nine maxims turn conventional military thinking on its head, highlighting the extent of the change required for a conventional military force to adapt itself to the demands of counterinsurgency.
The field manual emphasizes the primary role of traditionally non-military activities and the decisive role of other agencies and organizations in achieving success in counterinsurgency in Chapter 2, “Unity of Effort.” In Chapter 3, “Intelligence,” the field manual shows it understands that, while firepower is the determinant of success in conventional warfare, the key to victory in counterinsurgency is intelligence on the location and identity of the insurgent enemy derived from a supportive population; one of the Principles of Counterinsurgency is that “Intelligence Drives Operations.” The Appendix on “Social Network Analysis” helps drive the Army’s intelligence system away from a focus on analysis of conventional enemy units toward a personality-based understanding of the networks of super-empowered individuals that comprise the most dangerous enemies the United States confronts today.
In unconventional wars, body counts don't really count. In the Vietnam War, superior American firepower enabled U.S. forces to prevail in most tactical engagements. We killed plenty of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But killing didn't produce victory -- the exertions of U.S. troops all too frequently proved to be counterproductive.
So too in Iraq -- although Bush insists on pretending otherwise. His speech had him sounding like President Lyndon Johnson, bragging that, in each month since January, U.S. troops in Iraq have "killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 Al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists." If Bush thinks that by racking up big body counts the so-called surge will reverse the course of the war, he is deceiving himself. The real question is not how many bad guys we are killing, but how many our continued presence in Iraq is creating.
What's left? It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.
The most counterintuitive, as well as the most politically difficult, premise of the manual is that the American military must assume greater risk in order to gather much-needed intelligence and, in the end, achieve greater safety. The emphasis of the 1990s on force protection is overturned by the assertion of several breathtaking paradoxes: “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.” “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.” Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (and a close colleague of mine), has contributed an introduction that should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand the huge demands effective counterinsurgency will place on the military and the voting public. “Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it,” she writes, “or at least what it’s up against.”
Sewall can say what the generals who devised the manual cannot. She addresses the concern that the manual is nothing more than a “marketing campaign for an inherently inhumane concept of war,” arguing that if politicians continue to put young American men and women in harm’s way, military leaders have an obligation to enhance effectiveness, which in a globalized era cannot be disentangled from taking better care of civilians. Military actions that cause civilian deaths, she argues, are not simply morally questionable; they are self-defeating.
But Sewall explains that even if the military can overcome the substantial challenges of executing such a counterintuitive doctrine — and here the near-daily reports of large-scale civilian loss of life as a result of United States counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are a reminder of the yawning gap between theory and practice — it will not succeed if it does not get the civilian leadership and support it needs. The military does not have the expertise to perform the range of economic and political tasks associated with nation-building, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, as civilian reconstruction teams went unstaffed, it was forced to pinch-hit. Sewall rightly calls for the “risks and costs of counterinsurgency” to be spread across the American government, but notes this is not an overnight job. “More people play in Army bands than serve in the U.S. foreign service,” she writes.
The manual shows that the demands of counterinsurgency are greater than those the American public has yet been asked to bear. Sewall is skeptical that the public — now feeling burned by Iraq — will muster the will, even in Afghanistan, to “supply greater concentrations of forces, accept higher casualties, fund serious nation-building and stay many long years to conduct counterinsurgency by the book.”
While the United States military’s new counterinsurgency doctrine is based on achieving legitimacy with the local population, Ian Shapiro, a professor of political science at Yale, believes American foreign policy as a whole must vastly increase its legitimacy if it is to defang terrorists in the long term. For this to happen, he writes in his book CONTAINMENT: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror (Princeton University, $24.95), the president’s critics in the Democratic Party must stop freezing like “donkeys in the headlights” in the face of Bush’s war on terror and instead put forth an alternative strategy. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” he insists. Shapiro argues for a return to the cold war rubric of “containment” — a halfway house between “appeasement and the chimerical aspiration to achieve U.S. control over the global security environment.”
The more Nagl read, the more he understood the historical challenge of insurgency. Julius Caesar complained that his legions had trouble subduing the roving Britons because his men ''were little suited to this kind of enemy.'' In the early 1800's, Carl von Clausewitz wrote of ''people's wars'' in which ''the element of resistance will exist everywhere and nowhere.'' The book that most forcefully captured Nagl's imagination was written by T.E. Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who, during World War I, led Arab fighters against the Turkish rulers in the Middle East and described the campaign (taking liberties with the facts) in his counterinsurgency classic, ''Seven Pillars of Wisdom.''
Lawrence's is one of the few books in the canon written from the point of view of the insurgent. (Another is Mao Zedong's ''On Guerrilla Warfare.'') In a near-hallucinatory state, suffering from dysentery and lying in a tent, Lawrence realized the key to defeating the Turkish Army. ''Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,'' he wrote. Lawrence's guerrillas, by contrast, ''might be a vapour.'' For the Turks, he concluded, ''war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.''
In his own research, Nagl focused on two modern insurgencies in Asia. In Malaya in the 1950's, the British successfully suppressed a Communist revolt (comprised mostly of ethnic Chinese) by generally steering clear of excessive force and instituting a ''hearts and minds'' campaign to strip the insurgents of public sympathy. In Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's, the United States military took a different approach and failed. The Americans resorted to indiscriminate firepower and showed little concern for its effect on the civilian population. Comparing the two efforts, Nagl demonstrated that a key issue for a counterinsurgent army is to calibrate correctly the amount of lethal force necessary to do the job with the minimum amount of nasty, counterproductive side effects. Even if using force with restraint meant the mission would take more time or reduce the level of force protection, it was still an indispensable step: a successful counterinsurgency took care and patience. When Nagl's doctoral thesis, ''Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam,'' was published in 2002, it carried the subtitle ''Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife.''
The 282-page manual reads at times like a litany of the things America has done wrong in Iraq. But those arguing for withdrawal will find little solace. Insurgencies, it says, “are protracted by nature”. America and its allies must show the “ability, stamina, and will to win”.
Moreover, counter-insurgency cannot be done on the cheap. It requires large amounts of manpower—some 20 to 25 members of security forces for every 1,000 civilians. The 483,000 combined coalition and Iraqi forces (of dubious quality and loyalty) fall well short of the 535,000 to 670,000 required to secure Iraq.
In an example recently praised by George Bush, the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment carried out a model attack on insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar in September, first emptying it of civilians, then giving Iraqi soldiers the lead in the offensive. This success was, in large part, a response to failure, according to the regiment's commander, Colonel H.R. McMaster. On a previous deployment to Iraq, in western Anbar province, the unit had done terrible damage with random and aggressive house-to-house searches, mass arrests and thuggish crowd control. Since arriving in Tal Afar last April it had patrolled often and on foot, looking for human intelligence, and had avoided making indiscriminate arrests.
But Colonel McMaster was relatively lucky. He had seasoned troops, and enough of them, to control his area. The marine division currently in Anbar, Iraq's most violent province, is too thinly spread and too shot-at to develop such nice behaviour. Unable to get control of the rebellious towns in the Euphrates river valley, often supported by air strikes but rarely by Iraqi troops, the marines are fighting a mid-intensity war.
The views in FM 3-24 reflect a limited knowledge of airpower’s true role in the current operation and suspicion that airpower can all too easily prove counterproductive. This is all the more distressing in light of the view that Petraeus will set direction for the ongoing fight in Iraq.
The new doctrine argues that airpower is best put under control of a tactical ground commander or, at the highest level, the multinational force commander, but not an airman.
It usually takes a while for a government to realize that an insurgency is under way, Petraeus and Amos wrote. The insurgents “take advantage of that time to build strength and gather support.” When the fight erupts, defenders “have to ‘come from behind'" and catch up to the situation.
In short, counterinsurgencies don’t go too well at first. Western militaries “falsely believe that armies trained to win large conventional wars are automatically prepared to win small, unconventional ones” and fight COIN with a similar mind-set.
Over the past few years, Gen. Petraeus has been cultivating ties to the academic community, drawing on scholars for specialized knowledge and fresh thinking about the security challenges facing America. "What you are seeing is a willingness by military officers to learn from civilian academics," says Michael Desch, an expert on civilian-military relations at Texas A&M. "The war on terrorism has really accelerated this trend."
The terms of this relationship are most evident in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. In the face of a gruesomely persistent Iraqi insurgency, Gen. Petraeus was charged with revamping the outdated counterinsurgency doctrine. In an unprecedented collaboration, he reached out to Sarah Sewall, who directs the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, to help him organize a vetting session of the draft manual at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
The conference brought together journalists, human-rights activists, academics and members of the armed forces to exchange ideas about how to make the doctrine more effective and more humane. Ms. Sewall, who since 2001 has been trying to get the military to bring the concerns of the human-rights community to the table, tells me that with Gen. Petraeus it is like pushing on an open door. And according to Montgomery McFate, who had a hand in drafting the manual, this was probably the first time that anthropological insight has been officially incorporated into more than 200 years of military doctrine. In chapter one, it explicitly states that "cultural knowledge is essential to waging a successful counterinsurgency. American ideas of what is 'normal' or 'rational' are not universal." (The manual was published last month by the University of Chicago Press. Ms. Sewall wrote the foreword.)
"Anthropologists have the opportunity right now to influence how the national security establishment does business," writes Ms. McFate in an email from Afghanistan, where she is a senior adviser to the Human Terrain System project. A Yale University-trained anthropologist, she has been the target of bitter criticism from the anthropology establishment on account of her tireless efforts to convince the military that cultural knowledge is key to winning over the people in war-torn societies like Iraq and Afghanistan. She insists that a growing number of anthropologists are questioning the conventional wisdom and reconsidering whether the most effective way to influence the military is "by waving a big sign outside the Pentagon saying 'you suck.' "
