The Burden of Command, Cont.

This is sort of a continuation of my previous post, though I'm going to focus more on fictional characters now.

Naruto has one of the best (or worst) villains I've ever seen, though not in the normal sense.

Shimura Danzo - last name first, the way the Japanese do - is a powerful village elder and war hawk. You don't see him much in the first part of the show, but you start feeling his presence soon enough.

Danzo has appointed himself the role of a shadow leader, the one who does the dirty (but necessary) deeds that can never see the light of day. The anime/manga doesn't make it very clear how much the village leader - the Hokage - really knows what Danzo is up to. We don't know if some of his worst deeds had the implicit approval of the true leader, or whether he was acting entirely on his own.

I consider him one of the best villains, not because I like him... but because he represents the type of villainy we can really see in the world today. The ones who feel they are justified in doing all sorts of things, because being soft is to be naive, and the village will fail if you let those bleeding hearts rule.

And despite the horrible things he does, for the most part you can tell he really does believe what he says. He really does think he's doing it all for the good of the village.

The one point where I think that fails, even though he clearly still believes his own spiel, is when the village is under attack. You see him in a hidden location, surrounded by the secret force he created... a force trained to be blindly obedient to him... and someone asks if they should go out and fight to save their village.

He tells them 'no'. He has decided, 'for the good of the village', that the current regime is too soft. And so he planned on conserving his forces and taking over in the wake of the current disaster.

Because doing so was more important than trying to save anybody now.

It's interesting, as well, to see the many different characterizations of Danzo... in fanfiction, of course.

He's often a hated villain, almost worse than the big headliners, tbh. Subtle, creeping. Some people imagine what the village would look like if he achieved his goals, and become the village leader.

Almost all of them have a darker, grimmer village that's even more militaristic than a village of magical ninjas already was.

And yet there are times, too, where people accept his logic, or paint him in a less terrible light.

Anyways. I was reading a fanfiction that I think portrayed Danzo rather well, capturing his strange mix of good and evil, and putting him in a setting that he's somewhat well suited for.

I say 'somewhat' because of what I'm about to describe...

See, in the canon story Naruto's village goes to war with a neighboring village. A quick one, and highly unrealistic, but what can you expect from a children's anime? It gave the protagonist a setting he could shine in, and moved on.

I think this fanfic does a good job of imagining a more realistic version of the canon story. After all, the village is training young children how to kill other people... I don't dig too deep into it because (as I said) it's a children's show, and it's giving children characters of about their age that they can relate to. And even though I generally like the show for other elements (the whole debate about the cycle of hatred fit in nicely with some of my experiences in Iraq, though the story didn't exactly resolve it neatly. Which is in some ways more fitting, I suppose. I also like how Naruto, even if it's solely because of being the main character, is often able to make change through empathy. Well, empathy and fists, tbh. But he reminds me a lot of Brené Brown's Ted talk on vulnerability) this story reminded me a lot of my time in the military.

In particular the second part. See, in this fanfic the war with their neighboring village lasts longer than one story arc. The villages, btw, represent the military power of their respective nations... so Naruto is from the Leaf Village, in the Fire Nation. Their opponents are from the Sand Village, in the Wind Nation.

And so we see Naruto and his friends occupying Sand Village. Naturally, they're out in a desert.

I wonder sometimes if this author has military experience, because he captures a lot of what it's like to be deployed. You're often bored, rather isolated, and people go a little bit crazy finding some meager helping of entertainment or pleasure...

Like that famous quote that "war is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror".

Plus it shows the complicated relationships people built with each other, as occupier and occupied. You know, it's not exactly a shock that World War II led to Japanese and German war brides. Or that (even without a hot war) soldiers deployed to Korea sometimes bring back Korean brides.

Heck, those sorts of ties go back waaaaaaaaaaaay farther, and it's not just about marriage and war brides. The Crusades were given some credit for the later Renaissance, unless historians have changed their opinion on that... because even though Europe pretty much lost all knowledge of Greek history, the Arabs kept it... and interacting with them during the Crusades led to the restoration of a lot of that lost knowledge. You can probably find even older examples, but you get the gist...

Anyways. Naruto (and team) were out in the village when they see some of their fellow ninjas bullying a couple of the local kids, so they step in and stop it.

Danzo punishes them... not for stopping their fellow ninjas. He punishes them for doing so in a way that publicly showed disunity in front of their enemies. He probably wouldn't have cared if Naruto had handled it quietly, but he absolutely could not support any sign of dissension.

I understand that logic. I'm familiar with it. I know, in the military, that as an officer I should support the chain of command. Public dissension, especially as an officer, encourages insubordination and possible mutiny. I could think and feel things privately, can disagree, but I should show it behind closed doors... and never out in front of the troops. I say 'never' here, but there are extreme circumstances that might possibly warrant that... it's just that things have got to be really, really, bad. Actually, this might be a good time for a story.

There I was, out in Tikrit. Our battalion commander had gone to another location for something-or-other, and was having a hard time getting back. He'd taken a helicopter, you see, and you sometimes had to wait days to catch the next ride back. He was impatient, and called the office to see about getting a convoy to come down and get him.

Now, I suppose this could be a reasonable request for a battalion commander for an infantry unit, or somesuch. But this was a support unit and most of his forces were tasked out to other units. There was no real need for him to immediately return.

And convoys are where most of the risks were, where the IEDs and VBIEDs can target you. There were definitely some mutterings of concern, as the soldiers weren't all that keen on risking their lives on this.

I don't really recall how it got resolved, I think our Battalion XO or S3 (the second and third in command) basically told him 'No', and the whole thing was dropped.

I recall it, though, because some of the soldiers tried asking me what I thought about the whole thing. And I was in the uncomfortable position of not being able to say "I agree, it's a stupid idea, and your lives are worth better than this" because it's one thing to say that as another enlisted soldier... and it's quite another to say it when you're in a leadership position.

I've been in similar situations before, though none as dramatic and none with the potential for dire consequences... and it's part of why it's so important to me to have a work environment where I can trust the decisions that are made. I'd rather agree with the decisions I'm supposed to support, and not deal with the cognitive dissonance otherwise.

For those who don't understand why that matters... imagine a work environment where the group meets, they come to a decision, and because someone disagrees they go around blabbing their opinion to anyone and everyone. Then you have to revisit the issue, again and again, and it just Never. Goes. Away. Except that they set the tone, and everyone else starts doing it, and next thing you know no decisions are ever truly settled and the ideas (good and bad) just keep coming back. Sometimes a bad decision is better than no decision. That's again more applicable to soldiers under fire, but it holds true to a lesser degree in office environments. Anyways, once a decision has been made, it's time to either support the decision or realize that you can't... and need to resign or find a new job or something. Unless you're actively trying to sabotage an organization you hate, I suppose.

 Anyways. In this fic Danzo punishes Naruto and his team for showing the enemy that the occupying force wasn't unified, and I can see his logic...

But I think his priorities were skewed, which is the problem with Danzo in a nutshell.

He should also have been concerned with making it clear that the occupying forces were not going to terrorize the population. Because even though nobody likes losing, or having a foreign force occupy their territory, the fight might actually be over if the occupation is handled right. When it's handled poorly, though, people who are war weary and willing to move on (albeit unhappily) can find a few more sparks of energy as they realize just how awful their occupiers are. Can convince themselves that anything is better than the constant ______.

Historically...

Historically, back before nationalization and national armies and the like, troops often made their money with looting and pillaging conquered villagers. The Vandals wrecked Rome, lending their name to the world 'vandal' today.

There's something about the power dynamics of occupation that are similar to the dynamics captured in the Stanford prison experiment, and even if the majority of your soldiers wouldn't cross the line... any large enough population of people will have a few who would. Who may even take great delight in doing so.

That's why firm leadership and clear Rules of Engagement are so important.

Anyways, Danzo was concerned with looking weak in front of the enemy, when I think he should have been more concerned with making it clear that the bullying soldiers were acting without orders and did not represent the official position of the Leaf Village. (Historically, some stern leaders have even hung the first rapists or looters they catch, to make it clear such behavior won't be tolerated. Others have looked the other way. The point here is that there's are a lot of choices about how to deal with this sort of thing, and this sort of thing is rather inevitable in these sorts of situations, so you better figure out what matters the most and what sort of policies you're going to enforce.)

The Burden of Command

There's a WWII incident I think about periodically, though in looking it up there may not have been any truth to it (assuming this is the one I'd heard about).

The Allies had cracked the code and were able to read German transmissions, so they knew that the Germans were going to bomb the village of Coventry (though apparently this is not so? They knew an attack was coming, just not the specific location).

The part I think about, the dilemma, was that if they acted on that knowledge it would give away the fact that they'd cracked the code, so in order to defeat the Germans they chose not to... and let the village get attacked without warning them in advance.

Although it may never have happened, I think about situations where that may occur. Where you, as a leader, have to decide between using that advantage to save the village or strategizing to use it to win the war.

World War II...

Well, deception operations happened on a level we rarely think of these days. Like sidelining General Patton in order to make the Nazis think D-Day was a feint.

Or using inflatable tanks and sound tracks to create a pretend army.

Or hiding false information on a corpse, and leaving the body where the Germans would find it.

I think about it, because on the one hand we need leaders to make the tough calls in war, and sometimes distancing yourselves from the effects allows you to think through strategy better. To think of it like a game of chess, and not worry about the loved ones the pawns leave behind.

And yet, on the other hand, it's the type of thinking that leads to horrible results... where people lose sight of what they are fighting for, and why they're fighting, growing callous and harsh and wasting lives needlessly because they've successfully distanced themselves from the human suffering left behind.

It's part of why 'the greater good' is such a dangerous concept.

Go back to World War I, for example, when guns had improved to the point where charging them led to slaughter... in previous wars guns were less reliable, had less thoroughput, and even though a few soldiers would die in the attempt you could still take a position (and ultimately win the war)... except circumstances changed, and the awareness of it hadn't, so leaders kept telling their people to charge forward only to have most of them die in the attempt.

Soldiers know, going in, that they are risking their lives. They each have their reasons for signing up, motivations as varied as people themselves.

And so I conclude that the obligation, as an officer... as a leader... is to use what they are giving you wisely and well.

Not to waste their lives stupidly, but to risk them when it's called for.

You know, have a sound strategy.

I was reminded of all this because, well.... Iran has been in the news  a lot lately. That's a big ol' tangled mess that I could write a bunch of other posts on, but that wasn't what I wanted to get at today.

See, here's the thing. In Vietnam our leadership lost the trust of the people. The belief was that they weren't using the lives of their soldiers wisely and well...

I remember being in Iraq in 2004, 2005, 2006. Remember the screw ups made (like the way the Sunnis were handled), and I know such decisions led directly to unnecessary loss of life.

'Stay the course' irritated me no end, especially if I dwelled on it, because even though stubbornly outlasting the enemy can lead to victory... it's not really a strategy.

Of course, then came the surge, and COIN operations, and things changed. As one soldier told me, we seemed to be putting our resources in the right place.

And then... well, then the gains made were not capitalized on. You could argue that our leadership failed to live up to the trust bestowed on them by those willing to serve.

That comes out harsher in writing then I really feel, and yet I think I need to emphasize that to make my point.

Because Iran? Yeah, our relationship with them is complicated. The Iranian revolution, the Iranian hostage crisis, their extreme remarks on Israel, etc...

Maybe a case could be made for more direct action, but I haven't seen much of an indication that our leadership really learned their lessons.

It's sort of like... we need a scalpel wielded with surgical precision, and instead they're wielding machetes and blundering about. I'd rather we don't get involved, tbh, not unless there's truly an existential threat, because these yahoos are trying to play chess with people's lives.

Sure, soldiers will do as their ordered. I'm not advocating disobeying or anything. But as a voting and engaged citizen?

These are not the people I want making those sorts of decisions.

Foreign Policy

This article captures a lot of the reasons that I take professional predictions on China with a grain of salt:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/30-years-after-tiananmen-us-doesnt-get-china/591310/

It also serves as a handy reminder that humanity - our beliefs, values, culture, etc - have an impact on how effective policies are.

For example, Japan has buy in for healthcare laws that we don't.

People act like it should have been obvious that businesses would skirt around the intent of healthcare laws by doing things like reducing hours so employees don't qualify as full time (39 hours a week and you don't get healthcare because it's not full time), but truthfully?

It's only 'predictable' and 'inevitable' to us, because we know what the culture is like for our business class.

On Centrism, and Various Musings

There was a meme going around recently, and it went something like this.

"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.
You step forward.
S/he steps back.
"Meet me in the middle," says the unjust man.

I know I tend towards the center, but it's not that there's anything inherently great about being in the middle... and if you've got actual principles, where you fall may change as circumstances change.

It's just...

Imagine you're trying to figure out what an elephant looks like, and all you've got is the testimony of those proverbial blind men.

You don't actually know what an elephant looks like, and their testimony is strange and conflicting. But if you have some sense of who was located where (i.e. the person describing the trunk stood here, and the person describing tusks stood there, etc.) then if you assume they're all telling you what their true experience is, you might be able to build a model of something approaching a real elephant.

You'd probably have to know how to interpret their testimony, get some sense of scale, and it's probably never going to be 100% accurate, but it's something.

There are people out there who will lie, it's true. Will manipulate the situation for whatever reason. Maybe you know that blind man C always exaggerates, so you visualize something slightly smaller for the ears. And blind man D tends to be more conservative, so maybe the legs are actually bigger... whatever.

You really need some idea of what an elephant looks like, and this is all you've got to go on.

Political organizations may or may not be sincere in the arguments they make, but the masses who are persuaded by said arguments generally are. My more conservative aunts and uncles, for example, tend to value personal responsibility more... and they've got a point. I think they sometimes slide a bit too much into punitive measures in order to hold people accountable, Jesus had the whole parable about the Prodigal Son for a reason, and nobody should be permanently harmed by their bad decisions or they've got  no room/incentive to do better, but in a weird way people learn to take responsibility when we hold them accountable, and reminding people that they have choices and can control their own lives is sometimes a good thing.

Which is why all too often any advice I have has to be situation specific, and what I'd consider a good answer in one situation may be completely inappropriate for another (like my previous comment about capitalism. In many situations it's a good thing, but not all.)

I've talked before about underlying vulnerabilities, about why Russian influence campaigns gained traction, and this kind of gets at that.

But. It's... complicated. All too often we're all yelling 'fix it!', with no real idea which solutions are really going to fix a problem and which aren't. So we say we need X, or Y, and they  may or may not be the answer, but the underlying problem is genuine and it won't go away until someone comes up with a genuine fix. (And maybe some solutions will never be fixed, but we can't really know that until we've given it our best effort. Too many of the people who make it to the top have learned to dismiss complaints out of hand... as 'sour grapes', or from people who are just not as capable, and it gives them reasons to justify an unfair status quo as 'just the way it is', which I don't think we've proven is the case just yet.)

I try to listen for the underlying arguments that resonate, that show the underlying conflict... and it's not generally the buzzwords flying around. It's things like 'do we really have to cut off all the lower limbs of trees so kids don't get injured trying to climb trees? Or are we taking away an essential part of childhood in a futile attempt to make it safe?'

Is it the responsibility of the employer to keep their people from making stupid and injurious decisions, when they create the work environment and pressure their people to constantly do more, and faster? Or should we expect people to be smart enough not to try and climb an unsafe ladder?' (I lean more towards holding the business accountable, in that if the business doesn't provide any safe ladders and is pressuring their people to 'get it done', they clearly have shaped an unsafe environment... but even that is situation specific, and if two people decide to horse around on their fork trucks in clear violation of workplace guidelines I don't think that's on the business. (Videos on fork truck accidents can give you a sense of the potential damage, though I can't find the specific video I was thinking of. Two idiots were spinning their trucks around and, iirc, managed to tip the truck over completely.)

There are people out there who are bad actors, definitely. And maybe they are able to use their resources to spread ideas that are just plain wrong.

But then... why is the idea that big pharma would raise costs on needed medicine in order to rake in huge profits so believable?

And would companies like wal-mart be able to pay their people so little if their employees didn't have welfare and food stamps to help make a living? Or, in the absence of such government support, would too many people realize it's impossible to make a living and find an alternative, thus forcing the business to pay more in order to get enough employees? (As someone once put it, food stamps to employed people are like subsidies to the businesses that hired them. I'd never thought about it that way before, but when you put it like that... it's not entirely wrong, is it?)

That's assuming they could find an alternative, and what's that say about market forces anyway? That you're forced to accept less than a living wage because you're desperate and have to take what you can get? Isn't that a bit like demanding $100 from someone dying of thirst before giving them a bottle of water?

This post isn't meant to delve into that at the level such statements require, actually. It's just giving a sense of the different ways of looking at things. Our different perspectives, where we're all blind men and women, trying to draw a picture of some crazy thing we don't really understand.

And to explain, just a bit, what I try to do when I'm grappling with some wicked problem. Knowing the way we think, knowing our tendency towards biases of one sort or another, I try to use my best judgement to see where every. single. person's. experiences help define the model.

Update

Started a new job last week. Haven't really started doing what I was hired to do (mostly been reading/watching/studying some of what I'll be using) but, hey, at least I'm employed now! And I should be doing some interesting stuff.

That means I have a lot less free time now, but that's okay. In celebration (and for my birthday) I bought a couple of books, and my brother gave me one as a birthday gift - The Enlightened Capitalists, which covers a topic I was very interested in. It discusses why and how some attempts to combine making money with doing good failed. It's something I'd like to believe is possible, but it's always worth finding out why/how previous attempts didn't work out.

Also picked up a book called The Regency Years, which is interesting. Has more parallels to today then I really expected, tbh. I picked it up for a couple of reasons... first, because we generally look at history in isolation (i.e. the Constitution, the Civil War, etc) and don't get a sense for all the massive number of events going on concurrently. Like the old canard about how samurai and cowboys existed around the same time. The second reason? Well... regency romance is a genre, probably because Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer wrote for that time period, and I wanted to know more about it.

Not sure how much reading I'll be doing right now, but I've enjoyed what I've gotten through so far.

The Enlightened Capitalists has been thought provoking, especially as it touches on the desire for control. It talked about how Carnegie originally was an Enlightened Capitalist, before reading something-or-other that made him think his ability to manage resources showed he shouldn't be (i.e. better to have the profits in his hands than to pay his people more, and then he got involved with union busting and using the Pinkerton agency and whatnot, only to later turn around and get into philanthropy.)

It's like... I'm *mostly* a capitalist. I don't believe in central planning, at least. Nobody can predict what goods and services will be needed ahead of time, and the market does a better job of it. (I also can see the point in rewarding people for highly desired and rare skills, like managing large organizations. It's just that I think there are limits, and when we're talking about record profits and falling wages, the specific situation requires something different. Or, well... I'd really rather people were wise enough to choose to do something different, but if they're all going to be stupid enough to ignore that then they'll get the unrest that anyone could predict, and on their own heads be it.)

I talked before about how people don't just roll over and die for lack of access to needed resources, but there are tons of stories already about people who need insulin - or other medical care - already doing that. Dying, that is. Like the rather depressing Twitter conversation where someone asked what event radicalized you against the US healthcare system.

I can see the need to invest money in research and development, to get new and better treatment. Sure. But if that's what's going on then I really don't expect to hear reports about massive profits. (Though, to be fair, since I always try to look for arguments disproving my biases, the profits may not be as massive as we think. Still, people are dying because their health care - if they have it - doesn't cover enough of the costs.)

I wonder sometimes, well. Retirement plans that give workers stock in the company they work for ought to give workers some sense of ownership/profit for making their company a success. Assuming they get that option in the first place. But when you reap the results decades down the road, and the stock price is affected by all sorts of other parts of the business, and maybe some idiot CEO comes along and destroys the value of the stock you own, the end result is that most workers don't really feel like they benefit from any such profit their company makes.

I dunno. It seems to me that there's more than one way to organize a system. Like, why make ourselves think inside the existing box? It's not just capitalism or socialism. Heck, much of Europe used to be feudal, and people back then would have a hard time imagining the world we live in today.

But before going further into that I probably ought to discuss something else... and that probably ought to be a separate post.