Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has introduced a panoply of new techniques of government in the areas of intelligence processing, public relations, data collection and government secrecy. The blueprint that links many of these innovations to a unified theory of information and management can be found in an essay entitled “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business” by Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky in a 1999 Rand Corporation volume edited by Zalmay Khalilzad.1 While the essay focuses on corporate self-improvement tips for the U.S. military, over the last three years these techniques have crept into the civilian functioning of the executive branch. There they seem to account for some of the most radical, and to critics, provocative innovations in domestic security policy and government management by the Bush administration.
Like the policy statements from the Project for the New American Century, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” and most recently, Richard Perle’s and David Frum’s manifesto The End of Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,2 “Military Organization in the Information Age” lays out an ambitious and radical agenda that appears to have influenced the Bush administration. Unlike these other projects, “Military Organization in the Information Age” is not specifically about the Middle East region, nor does it lay out directives for strategy and action in international relations. Rather it presents a vision for the reformation of the military that would take advantage of the information revolution in order to maximize efficiency in corporate style.
Decentralization, specifically the dispersal of authority throughout the organization, is the predominant principle of the management style advocated by the authors. They cite management guru Peter Drucker’s credo that “central management needs few if any specialists. Bottom specialists will direct themselves.”3 The reliance on “bottom specialists” rather than the traditional vertical hierarchy and central control is reinforced by the historical experience of a military that effectively used the new information technologies of its time and had a culture of autonomous decision making at the bottom of the officer corps: the German Wehrmacht.
What is striking about the principles articulated by Fukuyama and Shulsky in the late 1990s is how effectively they foreshadow a revolution in the post9/11 world. This is not a “revolution in military affairs,” which might have yielded dramatic successes rather than embarrassing and dangerous logistical failures in Afghanistan and Iraq,4 but rather a revolution in civilian administration and government. The principles articulated in a paper that might have been subtitled “What We Learned from Wal-Mart and the Wehrmacht” seem to predict with remarkable efficiency the range of the Bush administration’s domestic policies and internal practices in the War on Terror that have mobilized critics. The implementation of the guidelines suggested by Shulsky and Fukuyama contributes to the further blurring of the boundaries between the military and civilian spheres, and between the realms of public policy and legitimate privacy that the declaration of the War on Terror initiated.
These practices include the funneling of intelligence past agencies and layers of scrutiny that might have prevented lies, forgeries and other misperceptions from speeding the invasion of Iraq; the collection of information on U.S. citizens, residents and visitors that has alarmed constitutional scholars and privacy advocates; and the prevalence of no-bid contracting with corporations linked to the Bush administration in the reconstruction of Iraq.
The empowering aim of corporate decentralization also appears to explain the so-called “neoconservative” network inside and outside the administration, as it suggests a personnel policy of keeping specialists distributed laterally throughout the organization with autonomy in decision making, “freedom to fail,” and rotation between high-pressure practical and low-pressure theoretical positions.5 The specialists are not forced to compete against each other for the top job, but are kept comfortable in intermediate positions. The final component of the decentralization program calls for the appearance of strong central control and the activation of rigorous investigative and punitive procedures when something goes wrong.
The authors are themselves associates of the neoconservative network that undergirds the Bush administration. According to James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans, all are particular protégés of the architect of the Iraq War, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,6 Francis Fukuyama, a member of the Project for the New American Century and President Bush’s Advisory Council on Bioethics, succeeded Wolfowitz as the dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and famously announced “the end of history” after the fall of the Soviet Union.7 Fukuyama’s coauthor, Abram N. Shulsky, is one of the most influential and least known members of the Bush administration inner circle. He is a scholar of China, intelligence and philosopher Leo Strauss,8 and heads the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, a murky but very important node in the movement of intelligence in the Bush administration.
The editor of the volume in which the article appeared is the Bush administration’s low-profile special adviser on both Afghanistan and Iraq, a former Unocal executive and the highest ranking Muslim in the Bush administration, Zalmay Khalilzad. Like Francis Fukuyama, he signed the 1998 Project for the New American Century letters to President Clinton and congressional leaders urging the military ouster of Saddam Hussein.9 Before they took their positions in the shadows of the Bush administration, these theorists offered insights that seem to have structured aspects of military policy in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, from battlefield tactics to military outsourcing and contracting for the land wars in Asia, but also in the ultimate “military operation other than war,” or MOOTW – the Bush administration’s War on Terror.
"Military Organization in the Information Age" reviews business literature for ideas on how to structure military organizations. It employs information-age buzzwords from the business world such as “flattening,” “informating” and “core competencies” to outline techniques by which a lean and responsive organization can take advantage of huge quantities of potentially useful data and skills without drowning in information or becoming a bureaucratic behemoth. The dispersal of skills and responsibilities throughout the organization to maximize access to dispersed bodies of information is key.
The authors advocate practices that structure the organization to maximize the speed of information transfer and utility and keep it flexible and quickly adaptable to new circumstances and experiences. Flattening the organization means shortening the paths of information movement from sources and other “bottom specialists” to decision makers throughout the body. “Informating” means collecting, storing and mining huge quantities of data by means of advanced non-human data processing systems with minimal additional labor. Focusing on “core competencies” like a “virtual corporation” promotes outsourcing and contracting of functions in which the cost and efficiency advantage is gained not through competitive bidding but rather through longer-term – and not always transparent – investment in research and development in the private sector.
Underlying the entire program laid out by Fukuyama and Shulsky is wariness of a wide distribution of knowledge. Applying the corporate virtue of efficiency and its information-processing techniques to the military allows Fukuyama and Shulsky to envision a military that forgoes institutional tradition in order to minimize bureaucratic confusion and redundancy. This could create tension and friction within rigid military structures. But applied to the realm of civil governance, these principles of information efficiency also compromise commitments to transparency, free-market competition, constitutional protections of personal privacy, and government accountability.
FLATTENING ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: THE “STOVEPIPE”
Fukuyama and Shulsky advocate replacing steep hierarchies of the traditional military organization with a flatter profile in order to “speed up the flow of information within the organization and create proper incentives for its use.”10 Flattening involves “reassigning the functions of one or more layers of middle management, either downward toward the bottom of the organization . . . or upward toward senior management,”11 so that information need not move slowly up and down a hierarchy. This allegedly avoids distortions created by what each level thinks its superiors want to hear, and minimizes bureaucratic territoriality and hoarding of information. As an example, Fukuyama and Shulsky cite studies of the German Wehrmacht by Martin Van Creveld.12
. . . while the German Blitzkrieg strategy of World War II depended decisively on the technological advances of the previous decades – tanks, aircraft capable of providing close air support, and mobile radios – it also required certain organizational characteristics. In particular its fast pace implied that lower echelons had to have the authority to take the initiative to exploit battlefield opportunities; they also had to have more direct, and more rapid, communications with headquarters and other military units that could support them. Front-line Panzer units, for example, could request air support directly from the Luftwaffe without having to go through higher Army echelons. By contrast, the British and French command structures required unit commanders to go through several intermediary headquarters to communicate with supporting units.13
This strategy was visible through the fog of war in the early days of the Iraq invasion in the battles of Um Qasr and Najaf. In the first case, U.S. Marines pinned down by Iraqi sniper fire after having failed to secure the port village, directly called in British and U.S. air support in order to finally take the town. In the second case, U.S. tanks of the Thirty-seventh Cavalry were able to secure air cover from Apache helicopters, which resulted in two aircraft downed and every one of the 30 others hit by gunfire. The ability of ground forces to independently summon air cover pulled aircraft away from the larger strategic mission of the aerial bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, winning the battles at the cost of damage to aircraft.14
In a passage that seems to foreshadow the logic behind the “revolution in military affairs” of the embedded journalism of the Iraq invasion, Shulsky and Fukuyama discuss some of the risks of over-shortening the information path, using as an example that:
the actions of a single squad in a Haitian city could have significant repercussions for the entire operation, especially if they were to be captured on tape by the Cable News Network and broadcast to the world. As a result, the White House officials might, under extreme circumstances, wish to be in direct communication with units on the ground, both to receive reports directly (otherwise, they could find themselves in the uncomfortable position of receiving press inquiries about events of which they had not yet been informed) and to direct actions on the ground to avoid unwanted incidents.15
This suggests that embedded journalism had its origins not just in the reassessment of the ineffective pool journalism of the first Gulf War,16 but also in the principle of flattening, which would make reports from the “bottom specialists” on the front lines of a “military operation other than war” (MOOTW) available to decision makers at the highest levels.
But flattening has been much more dramatic within the Bush administration itself than in its battlefield applications. The process of shortening the trajectories of intelligence and planning for the Iraq war by the civilians in Secretary Rumsfeld’s Pentagon illustrates this practice. Bypassing established layers of review of plans and intelligence by career professionals led to the Pentagon’s tension with the State Department in the buildup to war and in Secretary Rumsfeld’s political difficulties with the career military.17
In the second half of 2003, investigative journalism and insider accounts focused attention on Abram Shulsky’s own Office of Special Plans (OSP). Seymour Hersh dubbed the new direct information paths the “stovepipe.”18
Accounts from investigative reporters of The Nation, Mother Jones, The New Yorker and The Guardian depict a Defense Department intelligence annex that bypasses the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lateral appendage to the office of the secretary of defense with direct links to the White House and the office of the vice president. The OSP is outside the hierarchy, the bureaucracy and the standards of the intelligence establishments yet directed some of the most problematic intelligence material straight from Iraqi defectors produced by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress to the highest levels of the American government.19 The plans and policies that were cultivated in this 18-person operation paved the way to the Iraq War, and possibly determined important aspects of its conduct. The OSP seems a prime example of the kind of insulated, protected “experimental unit” that Fukuyama and Shulsky see as a crucial part of an adapting “learning organization.”20
These investigations have been confirmed and fleshed out by Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski in a whistle-blowing series of articles in a journal on the other side of the political spectrum, the American Conservative Magazine. The retired Air Force officer and Pentagon staffer recounts how the Near East South Asia (NESA) branch of the Pentagon’s policy section was flattened using the metaphor of Africanized bees, which “swarmed over the Pentagon, populating various hives of policy and planning.”21 Her account confirms that Shulsky’s Office of Special Plans is the nexus of the flattened organization and outlines how it positioned itself as such.
She describes the transformation in late summer 2002 of the NESA Iraq desk into the Office of Special Plans headed by Shulsky. According to Kwiatkowski,
. . . we were told that the expanded Iraq desk would become the Office of Special Plans and would move out. We were told not to refer to this office as the Office of Special Plans and . . . not to confirm that it was the expanded Iraq desk . . . . The Iraq-war-planning aspect would now be isolated from the rest of NESA and would establish its own rhythm and cadence, separate from the non-political-minded professionals covering the rest of the region . . . . ”22
Layers of civilian control were removed:
Those who had watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite knew that something calculated had happened to NESA. Key personnel, long-time civilian professionals’ hold on the important billets had been replaced early in the transition. The Office Director, second in command and normally a professional civilian regional expert, was vacant . . . . To remove that continuity factor seemed contraindicated, but at the time, I didn’t realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was being brought in from a variety of outside think tanks.23
By the winter of 2002, Kwiatkowski accelerated her retirement process, feeling that
civilian professionals and military officers were largely invisible. We were easily replaceable and dispensable, not part of the team brought in from the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.24
The flattening or shortening of communication paths in the Pentagon extended to military allies from the outside.
Kwiatkowski describes the ease and familiarity with which Israeli generals accessed the office of Undersecretary Feith (which Secretary of State General Colin Powell denies calling “the Gestapo office” as reported by Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack) without observing any of the normal protocols of escort and signing in.25 The reorganization that Kwiatkowski witnessed streamlined the information flow between the former Iraq desk, the office of the secretary of defense and ultimately the White House. 26 The information that flowed through the pipeline included talking points on the later-discredited reports of Iraqi agents meeting 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta in Prague, on the alleged purchase by Saddam Hussein of yellowcake in Niger, and on leaked low estimates of the manpower and troop costs of the upcoming war.27
“INFORMATING” THE ORGANIZATION
The utilization of information-processing technologies is crucial to institutional reform in the information age. Fukuyama and Shulsky’s vision of the information-age military sees “informating” or digitization to decentralize the organization and “facilitate the collection, processing, distribution and use of more detailed and more timely information throughout the organization.”28 In order to collect maximum information without succumbing to the burdens of reporting or information overload,
Information is collected automatically or as a by-product of other operations. One of the best known examples of this is the Wal-Mart system, in which the information that a particular product has been sold, which is obtained at the checkout counter when the bar code is scanned, is used not only to calculate how much the customer owes but is also transmitted to a companywide database. Without increasing the workload of the checkout clerk, and without burdening other company employees, timely and detailed sales information is collected for processing and use.29
The military analogue of this digitization process envisioned by Fukuyama and Shulsky prior to the Afghan and Iraqi wars involved Global Positioning System (GPS) locating devices, which provide a constant stream of information to a central data bank to be extracted and used as necessary within the laterally linked, flattened organization. According to the authors, because of “the vast amount of very specific and low-level data reported from each unit (e.g., the petroleum, oil and lubricant levels for each and every vehicle), the resulting database contains altogether much more information than any one user could possibly use,”30 but would allow instant pinpointing of problems.
The risks of the enormous dependence on non-human processing systems entailed in Wal-Mart-style informating are considerable. Since the vision is based on a general idea of information technology rather than specific technical systems, applications produce unforeseen complications. One possible negative effect on the battlefield was the number of friendly-fire incidents reported in the first week of the Iraq war as fighters dependent on data-processing technology removed a critical layer of human judgment and often failed to distinguish targets from allies. A slowly emerging consensus that the logistics of the war effort were seriously hampered by confusion and unclear lines of responsibility highlight the danger, recognized by Fukuyama and Shulsky, of information swamping in a lean, flattened organization.31
The deployment of new techniques of information collection, storage and processing in the civilian realm entails different risks than their use in real time on the battlefield and with wartime logistics. A prime application of the Wal-Mart-style informating technique in the civilian realm is the Terrorism (formerly Total) Information Awareness project spearheaded by pardoned felon Admiral John Poindexter.
Personal and financial data from credit card companies, banks and mailing lists would be collected in order to mine patterns for indications of terrorist risks.32 Although this project was renamed and shelved due to concern about the constitutionality of data collection on citizens, even in the wake of the empowerments of the PATRIOT Act, development of data collection, storage and processing systems continues at the local level. This is done through corporate initiatives on visitors to the United States through the U.S. Visitor fingerprinting and photography program, touted by the Department of Homeland Security as a mere 15-second delay in the processing of visa holders at U.S. ports of entry.33
CORE COMPETENCIES
This aspect of the “information revolution in military affairs” has two parts: focusing on the organization’s competitive advantages and “disencumbering oneself of functions that can be performed better by others.”34 The military, it is argued, can benefit from outsourcing peripheral and even core functions if the transaction costs of contracting are less than the costs of integrating the function in-house. The model of the virtual corporation divested of all but a few key functions is invoked.
In the invasion of Iraq we see the continuation and escalation of a decades long trend – the use of contractors to assume some of the key functions of the war.35 Thus Halliburton subsidiaries provide troop-support services36 and Vinell and Dyncorp provide military and security training for the new Iraqi police force and army.37 Those, in turn, would ideally take over from the U.S. military the frontline role in the War on Terror in Iraq and security enforcement under the occupation. Since the killing and mutilation of the bodies of four civilian security workers for Blackwater, the extent of the provision of security by such private firms in Iraq is beginning to become apparent.
Peacetime procurement of weapons systems in the information age is another major instance of focusing on core competencies of the military organization and outsourcing without the cumbersome process of bidding:
In an era of rapid technological advance . . . . lead times (for major weapons systems such as a new fighter or tank) can seriously hinder the ability of the armed forces to field the most effective weapon systems possible.38
The authors write almost wistfully about how a government-owned corporation could bypass federal procurement regulations. Their tone is even more clearly regretful when they acknowledge that
the underlying view is that a long-term relation on the basis of which it is possible to share information and expertise, will produce a better quality and price mix in the long run than will an “arms-length approach” that constantly forces suppliers to compete with each other. In general this strategy may not be available to a government agency . . . The philosophy guiding government contractors, on the other hand, is very different: In principle, they are supposed to be open to all bidders regardless of the costs or benefits involved.39
Shulsky and Fukuyama go on to suggest several ways around the inconvenience of the open-bidding principle, which holds government back from corporate style efficiency. This would have the advantage of facilitating “timely acquisition and utilization of equipment.” In addition, providing clear examples of what is possible with this greater efficiency “might change the political climate in ways that would ultimately make a full-scale reform more feasible.”40
The techniques presented to infiltrate, undermine and subvert procurement regulations include “skunk-works concept,”41 a form of umbrella contract in which new weapons systems are included under cover of preexisting contracts.42 They also suggest taking advantage of wartime exceptions to procurement rules:
In general, opportunities of this type should be sought out, both to exercise the system so that it will be better able to operate rapidly in case of war and to highlight the cost of the current regulatory regime. One might attempt to institute a system whereby, in the case of any ongoing operation, some amount of money would be made available for the development and procurement of equipment under “wartime” rules.43
To the authors, this conveys another secondary advantage: the mobilization of popular sentiment behind the executive branch for the state of perpetual war.
Under the rubric of concentrating on core competencies and increasing efficiency, well-established contracting procedures are pushed aside for the conduct of and preparation for war, but also for civilian functions such as the reconstruction of Iraq. Post-conflict private policing, oil-services and infrastructure reconstruction contracts have been awarded to companies with ties to the Bush administration. They have been denied to corporations from countries that declined to support the war, and they are also subject to no-bid procedures.44
Irregularities with the Iraq and Afghan war-contracting process have begun to register with watchdog groups and to leak into the mainstream press and even into burgeoning presidential campaign rhetoric. The recent closure of the investigation into Halliburton’s alleged overcharging of $61 million for oil imports into Iraq suggests, however, that the principle of concentrating on core competencies and favorably comparing the financial costs of outsourcing to the time and opportunity costs of in-house service or competitive bidding is alive and well in the Bush administration.45 The well-documented cronyism that accompanies no-bid contracting seems to provide the financial rewards that reinforce the personnel policies described below by materially rewarding key personnel far beyond the limitations of any public entity.46
EMPOWERING STAFFING POLICIES: FREEDOM TO FAIL
The Fukuyama and Shulsky essay provides insight into the staffing policies of the Bush administration, which have drawn attention to a network of policy makers referred to as “neoconservatives.” As is now well-known, they are a coterie of hawkish pro-Israeli unilateralists with association to the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (DWA), the Israeli Likud party, the philosophies of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, and conservative think-tanks, especially the Project for the New American Century. 47 The management principle of employee empowerment advocated by Fukuyama and Shulsky is apparently based on Prussian and German military practices of encouraging autonomy and responsibility in the lower officer corps inculcated with a common military culture. In this Teutonic spirit, the “right and duty of subordinates to make independent decisions” is emphasized over a vertical hierarchy of command and information flow. Trusting the discretion and intuition of individual officers and men requires a general military culture of fraternity, homogeneity, identity and trust. It also explains the unique features of the Bush administration, particularly the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, famous for his clashes with the career-military hierarchy presumably trained in non-Wehrmacht culture.48
In the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, the historian Max Boot argues that accusations of neoconservative influence on U.S. foreign policy are disproved by the absence of neoconservatives in the top tier of the Bush administration.49 But the empowerment and trust placed by higher-ups in second and third-rank civilian officials and consultants comes directly from “Military Organization in the Information Age.” An important component of corporate efficiency through personnel management involves a wide distribution of skills throughout the organization rather than a concentration of key specialists at the heart or the top. The lateral and horizontal tendencies are accentuated by not requiring that promotion be the reward for success. Modern management principles cited by the authors keep specialists in place and do not squander their talents and energies by making them compete for the few top spots.50
This accounts for the improbable prominence in the Bush administration of such widely spaced second and third-tier appointees as Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board former Chairman Richard Perle, but also Deputy Secretary of State John Bolton, Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby and National Security Council staff member Elliot Abrams, not to mention Abram Shulsky himself and other less well-known members of the network in domestic and international policy formation. There is no easily identifiable leadership core, but the culture of trust, common politics and “freedom to fail” that unites key actors across the organization produces a coherent set of policy tracks.
Shulsky and Fukuyama cite the importance of a “freedom to fail” personnel policy to encourage taking risks and thinking outside the box.51 Promotion is to be based on patronage and demand, not on fairness, routine or supply.52 Similarly, the “freedom to fail” attitude involves interchanges of personnel between conventional and experimental postings in order to disseminate ideas and protect careers.53 Drs. Wolfowitz and Shulsky themselves exemplify the movement between academic and governmental postings that spreads their ideas through contact with others in various settings, and the inconspicuous shifting between the world of theory and the world of action. This is not unlike the revolving door between government and industry that the first-tier members of the Bush administration have made an increasingly prominent feature of the landscape of power.54
The “freedom to fail” policy helps explain the prominence of key administration political appointees such as Elliot Abrams and Admiral John Poindexter, for whom pardoned felony convictions were not a serious barrier to reinstatement.55 The continuing prominence of neoconservative ideologue Richard Perle after conflict-of-interest scandals forced him out of the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board to a less noticeable role in the same body suggests that the cronyism that the virtual corporation promotes actually finances the “freedom to fail” policy in a very direct manner.56
THE ILLUSION OF TOP-DOWN CONTROL
Shulsky and Fukuyama acknowledge that the larger political culture requires the appearance of what they call “the pervasive zero-defects mentality – which tends to regard every error as a scandal” and of the “top-down method of control,”57 which seems to the observer to provide a reassuring measure of unified and accountable authority:
This appearance may be illusory, but it has its political uses – when something goes wrong, the existence of a complex set of rules, not all of which . . . will have been obeyed, means it will be possible to find someone to blame. Furthermore in the event of a disaster, one can always add a new layer of regulations or controls to show that one is doing something to prevent the problem’s recurrence.58
The casual acceptance of the necessity of illusion and outright deception in the worldview of Fukuyama and Shulsky provides insight into the culture that produced the Jessica Lynch made-for-TV story and numerous other fictions about the Iraq war and the larger War on Terror.59
But the assiduous cultivation of the image of top-down control, covering for but conflicting with dispersed authority, throughout the organization was most visible in White House responses to the potentially disastrous exposure in the summer of 2003 by Ambassador Joseph Wilson of false allegations that Saddam Hussein attempted to buy uranium from Niger.60 In this case, stove piped intelligence linked to the vice president’s office made its way into President Bush’s State of the Union address and the building case for war.61 The subsequent leaks to Robert Novak of the covert position of Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative was a hasty and ill-conceived response emerging from somewhere in the Pentagon or vice president’s office which itself required the formation of an investigation. Too much “freedom to fail” by lower-level decision makers seriously threatened the illusion of central control. CIA chief George Tenet fell unconvincingly on his sword in an attempt to absorb the blame for the scandal.
Most recently the WMD intelligence manipulation came to a head with the acknowledgement by Chief U.S. Weapons Inspector David Kay that no WMD were to be found in Iraq.62 In these cases, the CIA was very publicly blamed (and even compromised through the punitive outing of an operative) for lapses for which it was arguably not responsible. The highly visible responses by the head of the intelligence agency make a convincing show of “top down control” covering for “freedom to fail.”63
CONCLUSIONS
The essay by Shulsky and Fukuyama provides insight into the techniques that have distinguished the Bush administration: a flattened architecture of specialists with autonomy and freedom to fail located laterally throughout the organization, collecting and mining information and shooting it through stovepipes while other functions are preferentially outsourced and the appearance of central control is assiduously maintained. The original model is corporate, and the only application suggested by the authors is to the military, but the evidence of these principles in action in the civilian administration is ominous, as management technique encroaches on the realm of public accountability. The War on Terror has allowed corporate and military organizational principles to creep into civilian administration, but the actual practice has revealed some major problems.
The application of these techniques in the Bush administration shows some risks and internal contradictions as well. Even as the organization is vertically compacted so that information can flow from bottom to top more quickly, it is laterally expanded, and often the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Cutting out the middle has led to disastrously faulty intelligence, just as cutting out human data processing has led to confusion on the battlefield, and the freedom to fail has outstripped the illusion of central control as scandals multiply in the ranks of the neoconservatives. Critics of the Bush administration can hope that the unfolding scandals resulting from poor information management, too much dispersed autonomy and freedom to fail in the White House, the vice president’s office and the Pentagon will prevent the ultimate triumph of a homegrown American military corporatism.
1 Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” The Changing Role of Information in Warfare, ed. John P. White (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1999).
2 Thomas Donelly, Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” (Washington, DC: Project for a New American Century, 2000); David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2004); and Richard Perle, et al., “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (Jerusalem and Washington: Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996).
3 Peter Drucker, “The Coming of the New Organization,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 66, No. 1, 1988.
4 “U.S. War Machine Nearly Fell Apart, Army Reveals,” Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2004.
5 Murray Friedman, “The Rebirth of Neoconservatism,” The Forward, December 13, 2002, Ari Shavit, “White Man’s Burden,” Haaretz, 2003.
6 James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004). See pages 22-26, 75, 113, 209-213 for an understanding of how the influence of Alan Bloom at Cornell/Telluride and Leo Strauss and the Wohlstetters at University of Chicago would flourish through social and professional networks of protégées rather than directly through intellectual or emotional proximity to the professors themselves.
7 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Penguin, 1992).
8 Abram Shulsky, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 3rd ed. (Brassey’s Inc., 2002), Abram Shulsky and Mark Burles, Patterns in China’s Use of Force: Evidence from History and Doctrinal Writings (Santa Monica: RAND, 1999), Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (by Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime, ed. John Murley (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
9 See the Letter to President Clinton and Letter to Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich (1998) at http:// www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm. The signers of the two letters are a “who’s who” of neoconservatives in academia, journalism, government and business.
10 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business.”
11 Ibid.
12 Martin Van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).
13 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business.”
14 Al-Jazeera, “Um Qasr and Zubair Resisting the U.S.-UK Invasion,” 2003 (cited March 21, 2003), online at http://aljazeerah.info/News%20archives/2003%20News%20archives/March%202003%20News/21%20n/ Um%20Qasr%20Iraqi%20border%20town%20invaded%20by%20USUK%20troops%20%20aljazeerah.info.htm.
15 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business.” p. 334.
16 Jacqueline Sharkey, U.S. Military Restrictions on the Military from Grenada to the Persian Gulf (1991).
17 Jane Perlez, “Bush Team’s Counsel Is Divided on Foreign Policy,” The New York Times, March 27, 2001; and Thomas Ricks, “Desert Caution: Once Stormin Norman, Gen. Schawarzkopf Is Skeptical About U.S. Action in Iraq,” The Washington Post, January 28, 2003.
18 Seymour Hersh, “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2003.
19 Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” The Guardian, July 17, 2003; Robert Dreyfuss, “More Missing Intelligence,” The Nation, June 19, 2003; Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, January 26, 2004; Seymour Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2003; and Mark Perelman, “Pentagon Team on Iran Comes under Fire,” Forward, June 6, 2003.
20 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” pp. 347-49.
21 Karen Kwiatkowski, “In Rumsfeld’s Shop: A Senior Air Force Officer Watches as the Neocons Consolidate Their Pentagon Coup,” The American Conservative, December 1, 2003.
22 Karen Kwiatkowski, “Conscientious Objector: An Air Force Officer Watches Civilians Craft the War Plan,”
The American Conservative, December 15, 2003.
23 Kwiatkowski, “In Rumsfeld’s Shop: A Senior Air Force Officer Watches as the Neocons Consolidate Their Pentagon Coup.”
24 Karen Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” Salon.com, 2004.
25 Ibid.
26 Mike Allen, “Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2004.
27 Kwiatkowski, “Conscientious Objector: An Air Force Officer Watches Civilians Craft the War Plan.” 28 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business.” p. 330.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 “‘Friendly Fire’ Hits Kurdish Convoy,” BBC News, April 6, 2003, “U.S. War Machine Nearly Fell Apart, Army Reveals.”
32 “Report to Congress Regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 2003; and Paul Rosenzweig, “Defending the Pentagon’s Information Awareness Program,” Fox News, September 8, 2003.
33 Brian Bergstein, “Several States Embrace Matrix,” Associated Press, February 1, 2004; Ric Feld, “Foreign Visitors to USA Get Fingerprinted, Photographed,” USA Today, January 4, 2004; Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Northwest Gave U.S. Data on Passengers,” The Washington Post, January 18, 2004; and Pat Kossan, “Phoenix School First to Install Face Scanners,” The Arizona Republic, December 11, 2003.
34 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” p. 330; and Francis Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky, The “Virtual Corporation” and Army Organization (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1997).
35 Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
36 Jane Mayer, “Contract Sport: What Did the Vice-President Do for Halliburton,” The New Yorker, February 9, 2004.
37 Kevin Baron, “Windfalls of War” Center for Public Integrity, 2003.
38 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” p. 354.
39 Ibid., p. 354.
40 Ibid., p. 354.
41 Ibid., p. 356.
42 Suneel Ratan, “Mars Mission a Trojan Horse?” Wired News, January 16, 2004.
43 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” p. 357.
44 Jackie Spinner, “Halliburton Gets More Iraq Work,” The Washington Post, 2004.
45 Naomi Klein, “The $500 Billion Fire Sale,” The Guardian, January 17, 2004; and Sue Pleming, “Army Issues $15 Billion of Building Deals,” The Washington Post, January 13, 2004.
46 Baron, “Windfalls of War”; Mayer, “Contract Sport: What Did the Vice-President Do for Halliburton”; and Abigail Rayner, “New Inquiry Examines Hollinger Bonus Plan,” London Times, 2004.
47 Friedman, “The Rebirth of Neoconservatism”; and Shavit, “White Man’s Burden.”
48 Kwiatkowski recounts hearing General Zinni denounced as a traitor inside the policy section of the Pentagon, calls for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s resignation from the administration, and belittling of Admiral Trago. Kwiatkowski, “Conscientious Objector: An Air Force Officer Watches Civilians Craft the War Plan.”
49 Max Boot, “Think Again: Neocons,” Foreign Policy, 2004.
50 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business,” p. 352.
51 Ibid., p. 349.
52 Ibid., pp. 350-1.
53 Ibid., p. 348.
54 Mann (p. 35) points out another instance of this policy, the effective teamwork of Wolfowitz on the inside and Perle on the outside through decades of policy work. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.
55 Ari Fleischer, “Press Briefing, Admiral Poindexter,” 2002.
56 {Wolf , 2003 #54}Rayner, “New Inquiry Examines Hollinger Bonus Plan.”
57 Fukuyama and Shulsky, “Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business.”
58 Ibid., p. 358.
59 Glen Rangwala, The Thirty-Six Lies That Launched a War (Centre for Research on Globalisation, 2003), online at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RAN307B.html; and Leslie Stahl, Bush Sought ‘Way’ to Invade Iraq (CBS 60 Minutes, 2004 [cited January 11, 2004 2004]), online at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/ 01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml. Other possible instances of mendacity are emerging in the inquiry into President Bush’s military record from the 1970s. Ralph Blumenthal, “Move to Screen Bush File in 90s Is Reported,” The New York Times, February 12, 2004.
60 CNN, “Text of CIA Director George Tenet’s Statement,” 2003.
61 Julian Borger, “Cheney’s Future at Stake,” The Guardian, February 11, 2004; David Johnston, “Top Bush Aide Is Questioned in CIA Leak,” The New York Times, February 10, 2004; ABCNet Online, “Pentagon Offices Face Probe on Iraq Claims,” 2004 (cited February 19), online at http://www.abc.net.au/news/ newsitems/s1048656.htm; David Sanger, “President to Order Inquiry into Iraq Intelligence Lapses,” The Washington Post, 2004; also Mark Tran, “Pentagon Launches Halliburton Inquiry,” The Guardian, December 12, 2003.
62 Jessica Mathews, et al., WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); and Greg Mitchell, “Editorials Question Bush’s Role in ‘Cooking’ up a War,” Editor and Publisher, January 28, 2004.
63 William Branigin, “Tenet: Analysts Never Claimed Imminent Threat before War,” The Washington Post, 2004; Sanger, “President to Order Inquiry into Iraq Intelligence Lapses”; and Eric Rosenberg, “‘Heads Should Roll over Iraq’ Adviser Wants U.S. Intelligence Chiefs to Quit,” Toronto Star, February 18, 2004.