“I want you to have a bias for action,” one of my basic school instructors told our class of boot lieutenants. “When there’s not enough information to make a great decision, I want you to make a good one. When there’s not enough for a good one, I want you to make any decision. Indecision kills.”

Marine training was life altering. I learned to go full speed or expect to die. I became accustomed to having my flaws and strengths visible to everyone. I learned how to associate a purpose and intent with everything I did, and explain it in as few words and pictures as possible. In short, I became a thick-skinned, order-interpreting, order-executing, and order-giving machine. I was incapable of sitting still if there was something to do.

After getting to the fleet, it didn’t take me long to start putting what I’d been taught to practice. But really, it was the four years of cultural transformation that had turned me from an easy-going, non-confrontational kid into a quick reacting, millisecond-managing, booming voice authoritarian. I wasn’t the same person anymore, and I’m sure I never will be again.


Every leader has his or her own style. The style I developed was to bulldoze. I’d try to win my troops’ confidence by showing a high level of expectation, capability, and strength early on. Whether or not they were impressed was irrelevant- soon I’d begin imposing my standards of excellence on them and demanding they perform at usually one pay grade above their actual ranks- I also made it a point to empower them so they had the authority to go with the higher standards. Then I would methodically begin piling more and more work onto our unit until I thought we had reached capacity, and then add a little more.

My style developed this way in large part because the Marine Corps taught me to never be satisfied. The Marine ethos stated that I would keep improving my fighting hole until I received the order to fill it in; to keep training until I was hitting center mass with every round even if I could make high scores without doing so. I lived this philosophy in every aspect of my life- from my bulldozer leadership style, to the gym, to the way I wore my uniform.


The things I was taught to do would make most civilians, and some members of the sister services, cringe. I’m not talking about the usual party tricks: drill instructors screaming, sleep deprivation, the cold, the lack of food and sanitation, or even sleeping through mortar attacks. I’m talking about becoming the opportunistic killer I was willingly molded into.

When I talked to my battalion intelligence chief before my first convoy in Iraq, after he had told me where the recent IED action was, only one question came to my mind: Who can I kill? Fallujah was an asymmetric battle: the bad guys knew who I was and where to find me but the opposite wasn’t true. I was sick of the mortars and rockets, sick of being on the sidelines. Could I kill anyone with a weapon, out of uniform? How about cell phones? How about men digging holes on the side of the road?

What you learn in the Marine Corps is that you are only as successful as the number of opportunities you exploit, and therefore the number of opportunities you can identify. Likewise, you are only as safe as the problems you can solve, and therefore the ones you can uncover. As with everything, there’s a certain amount of luck involved in warfare, but the minute you put success or failure into fate’s hands you cease to be a leader. I had no intention of leaving a guy burying a bomb in the dirt alive for the next convoy to pass behind me.


About a year after I had got out of the Marine Corps and was living back in New York, my friend found the three-inch Spyderco knife I kept under my belt. “What is this?” she asked, concerned, but amused. Embarrassed, I put it in my pocket and told her to forget about it- “old habits,” I excused myself. But to me it made perfect sense. I wasn’t taught to fire warning shots. If some thug pulled a weapon on me, he intended to kill me. I would kill him first. This was a problem I could solve. End of story.


For the last three years, I’ve been telling myself that one day I’ll be able to learn the collective leadership model practiced by so many civilian partnerships like the one I’m trying to start with some of my grad school peers. That I'd be able to resist the urge to take charge of every leadership vacuum I came across and that I’d learn how to build consensus diplomatically, keeping my opinion to myself. That I'd even learn how to let an opportunity pass by.

One day, maybe, but not yet.

A large portion of Americans, including those in the White House, think that drilling for oil domestically could help reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil and help us reclaim a measure of energy independence as well as alleviate the economic downturn that current oil prices are inducing.

This week the Times reported that President Bush is seeking to repeal a ban against offshore drilling in Florida that his father President Bush (41) implemented. He and Vice President Cheney have long campaigned for exploitation of the Arctic North Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, but have been defeated in Congress.

Should we pursue a domestic drilling strategy to help stem foreign oil dependence? Long answer: Yes, if we were Saudi Arabia. Short answer: No.


Longtime readers of 2 Dinar will already know me as an environmentalist, but also as a pragmatist who sees huge, untapped synergies between environmental and economic sustainability, instead of the mutual exclusivity preached by lobbyists. But the debate over oil has become yet another speculation-fueled tirade of ignorance dominated by outmoded industrialists, obtuse news media pundits, and crusading environmentalists. To make sure I never found myself in one of those camps, I took a graduate business class about the oil and clean tech industries, taught by a leading journalist in these sectors. The takeaway: there’s plenty of oil in the ground, but the ecological, political, and economic costs of relying on it will totally outstrip the threat of running out of it.


Why Oil is Expensive

Oil is a highly volatile commodity, and as the lifeblood for industry, its value is analyzed, gambled on, and traded just like debt, which means that intangibles outside of the world of refinement and distribution can drastically affect its price. Additionally, worldwide demand from growing economies (including ours) has increased while the oil industry has not grown its production or reserve capability at a comparable rate.

An article by Keith Sill, an economist with the research department of the Philadelphia Fed, said that most oil shocks have been associated with conflict in the Middle East, and indeed, without even counting the major wars in that region, concerns about the vulnerability of the Saudi oil production apparatus to terrorist attack have probably floated the oil price substantially on their own. Oil is volatile, and its price reflects far more than simply how much OPEC is pulling out of the ground.


Reserves

Of the world oil reserves, estimated at 1.1 trillion barrels, 23% is located in Saudi Arabia, 16% in Canada (the largest supplier of oil to the US), 12% in Iran, and 10% in Iraq. The US holds less than 3% of the world’s proven reserves.

Despite these statistics, the US accounts for 26% of world oil consumption, a staggering 20.8 million barrels a day and over 1.4 times the total consumption of the EU despite having an economy 12% smaller than the EU and a population 39% smaller.

If America is going to address its oil problem, relieve heating and transportation costs on American families, and reduce the effect of high prices on our economy, we are not going to do it by drilling within our own borders. By my calculation, if we were able to pull all 21 billion barrels of proven oil out of the ground in and around the US, at the CIA-listed daily consumption of 20.8 million barrels, that oil would only last 33 months, even with a flat population and GDP curve.

An additional note about the oil in America is that that oil is not ready to come out of a gas station nozzle near you. The oil in ANWR, for instance, would take 10 years to get to market. And while Florida is a lot closer to the American market than Alaska, drilling there won’t make today’s oil spike go away. Don’t forget, in 2002, oil cost less than $20 a barrel.


Leap Frog

In the clean tech sector, “leap frog” is the term used to describe moving developing economies past the industrial era energy apparatuses (coal, oil) and straight to sustainable technologies like wind and solar. Without a doubt, there’s no such thing as a perfect clean energy solution yet, but investing in unsustainable, polluting, and price-sensitive energy systems is far more imperfect.

In the same way that developing nations are partnering with NGOs as well as foreign investors in clean tech to bypass oil, America should seize this opportunity and do the same. Instead of continuing to subsidize the oil industry and maybe pulling out two and a half years of oil from ecologically delicate areas, let’s instead invest that time, money and effort into figuring out how to get off oil and onto something sustainable. If we’re pushing China to do it, with an economy that is growing five times as fast as ours, we can do it too.


Scamming for a Fix

I don’t know about you, but I’m embarrassed when the president of the US, allegedly the most “can-do” nation in the world, repeatedly goes to the Saudis and begs for increases in oil production to sustain our ridiculous habit. Just as futile, drilling in and around the US for oil is nothing more than searching the couches for loose change, and the analogy holds when you consider just exactly what you can buy with loose change- almost nothing. Telling Americans that off and on-shore drilling in the US is a potential solution to our oil problem is either sheer ignorance, or an attempt to exploit citizens to the benefit of the oil industry. I’ll not cast the first straw, but I will say this, our oil problem is here to stay as long as Americans stay complacent.


Do Something: Your Senators Your Representatives

Further Reading: 2 Dinar: Oil Mathematics Part I NY Times (1) NY Times (2) BBC CS Monitor CIA on Oil Consumption CIA: US factbook DOE on US Oil Imports Wikipedia Oil Reserves Sum-up

As a former Marine officer, I sometimes get employment offers for military-related work. At the end of April, I received an email from a contractor seeking former military personnel capable of speaking French to spend a month teaching peacekeeping skills in an African country (intentionally unnamed). Since I love to travel and was broke at the time, I immediately jumped on the opportunity.

This small African country, located just below the Equator, is coming out of a 10-year civil war and whose painful history included a genocidal massacre. Through compromise and power-sharing agreements, the government was able to slowly reintegrate the various factions back into society, finishing at the end of May with a new peace treaty bringing the rebels down from the mountains. Despite its internal problems, the country is nonetheless a contributing member of the African Union (AU) and has already sent a reinforced battalion (approximately 700 soldiers) to support peacekeeping operations in Mogadishu, where they have already lost personnel to suicide attacks.

In many ways, the AU is a great deal for the country- the army gets to keep all the equipment the AU purchases to support their mission in Mogadishu, and their units receive free military training courtesy of the US State Department.

When I arrived in Africa, I was a little nervous. I thought that the contractor’s staff would be mostly former Special Forces personnel, fluent in French and with years of experience in Africa, and I was worried that I would be the weakest link in the unit. I found that in my team of eight, I was actually in the top third for both experience and ability. We did have several native-French speakers, but on the other end, we had others with no ability at all in French. With the exception of our one former French Legionnaire, the team’s background was diverse and unspecific- ranging from sergeants to colonels, and from Special Forces to supply.

Once we got working, classes were easy. Most had been created previously and only required some final tweaking. Others needed to be created from scratch or translated into French. We normally taught one or two classes a day, each lasting 30 minutes to an hour. The rest of the time, we would sit in the back of the classroom and play on our laptops. In the afternoons we hung out at the hotel pool or went horseback riding.

I quickly realized that the work assigned to us could be done by two or three competent professionals at a much lower cost than having the eight of us hanging out. When I asked why the company had brought over so many personnel, I was informed that by the stipulations of the contract with the State Dept, the contractor was required to have a certain number of trainers on hand. Some of the more experienced contractors told me of several cases where the company had brought someone over and left them in the hotel doing nothing simply to have enough personnel to satisfy the contract. This amazed me, considering the costs involved.

As a rookie contractor, I received $2000 a week as my salary. I also received $602 a week in per diem, plus the cost of my travel to Africa. On top of that, we stayed in a resort hotel for about $100 a day/room. I was also covered by the normal government insurance that contractors receive for medical/death. Not too shabby considering I was performing roughly three hours of real work a day, and I was really only doing that much because I was bored and had volunteered to do extra translation and teaching.

Some of the cost seems justified. The per diem rate ($86/day) was based upon the State Department’s rate for the country, and was expected to cover incidentals such as laundry as well as food. As for the salary, I suppose that it can be justified by the difficulty of getting skilled personnel to travel to potentially dangerous and “austere” environments. Others have told me that some of the other missions have required the trainers to live in conditions that were more spartan. My one major complaint would be the lack of a quality personnel-screening process. While the majority of the personnel were competent and capable, several personnel lacked either the necessary military experience, language capabilities, or both. Additionally, one instructor was sent home for drunkenness after several warnings and apparently this was not the first country in which he had been relieved of his duties.


However, at the risk of the pot calling the kettle black, the real waste is found in the NGOs. The amount of money spent supporting the people who work for the NGOs and their lifestyles is incredible. In the country I was working in, the UN has several missions addressing food distribution and re-integration of former combatants. Worthy tasks, but when one sees the countless convoys bringing the foreign NGO workers from their palatial estates (each with security, maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) down to the offices in the sprawling UN compounds, one wonders if the money is really being well allocated. Not to mention the number of times I have seen UN employees arrive at my hotel just to drop off their children to play in the pool. I know that aid workers living in foreign countries need some diversions, but the average foreigner’s house rivaled even the US ambassador’s. Many of the workers have lived in these countries for years- living like royalty while also claiming that they are doing the best they can to improve the world.

I have heard many arguments for and against contractors. After fighting in Iraq and then becoming a contractor myself for the State Department, I’ve come to believe that contractors can be a powerful tool, especially to free up soldiers to fight. In my case, the US government was able to hire former military members to achieve their goals in Africa, while avoiding the use of their over-stretched Special Forces units (normally used for these types of training missions). To be effective, I believe contractors need to be closely and properly supervised, from the bidding/contracting process down to their actual daily work. I do not think we should necessarily write off using contractors completely, but their use should not be unrestricted. Teaching peacekeeping to a friendly nation is one thing- protecting the ambassador to a country we’ve invaded and occupied is another.


Further Reading: Wired

Last February, I caught the end of a hearing by a congressional appropriations subcommittee on defense in which (then) Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker were being interviewed about army funding requests.

The most inquisitive and relevant question came from Rep. Marcy Kaptur [D-OH] who asked Sec. Harvey how many contractors were in Iraq, and what portion of the requested money that the Army was asking for would go to contractors. She qualified her question by asking about the salaries contractors receive, which she had been told were much higher than that of troops for doing the same job. Sec. Harvey was unable to answer for the record, but he gave this explanation as to why so many tax dollars were going to contracts:

“We only pay the contractor for who he has in theater and not who he has at home. You need three soldiers for every contractor…because of the way we manage the force… [soldiers] have one year deployed, two years at home station. It’s a savings in money because it’s not what you pay the contractor per se, it’s the number of soldiers that that contractor [replaces].”

Putting aside the fact that no one has ever had two years in between deployments during this war, his argument makes one point and one assumption: first, it’s cheaper to fight a war this way. Second: the money is well spent.


Money Well Spent

When the chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Murtha [D-PA] said: “We need to get this thing [Iraq contracts] under control”, Sec. Harvey responded: “Let me just say those contracts are managed very closely with close financial controls, there’s task orders, there’s audits by the defense contract audit agency, audits by the army audit agency.”

At this point, there is universal acceptance that many Iraq contracts were mishandled and US taxpayers have been defrauded several billion dollars. This week, the NY Times reported that “A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.”

In some cases, only notes scribbled on pieces of paper were offered as receipt for mysterious services provided or monies dispensed- the lowest denomination being tens of millions of dollars.


Assuming the DoD was actually saving money on logistics contracts, were they getting equivalent or better quality than the military itself could provide? Not always. In March, the Pentagon Inspector General released a report stating that troops had gotten sick from using KBR-provided water on five US military sites in Iraq.

To place this vignette into perspective- in 2003 I did an exercise in the Okinawan jungle, and the engineers set up a purification unit on a nearby swamp to make drinking water. It was about 95 degrees outside and nearly 100% humidity every day. Some colonel walked by and started grilling the Marines on their procedures, explaining that if the water was no good, Marines would be getting really sick. The Marines were squared away and we had no such problems for the month in the field. On the other hand, I know a former Marine engineer who is now working for KBR, making water in Iraq just like we did in Japan that summer.

The takeaway: these three events make it impossible for me to draw causality between who’s making “good” or “bad” water, but I still choose to infer this: no military ownership of military logistics = not military logistics. Therefore, between massive fraud and lower control and quality, is there still a cost savings?


War is Cheaper this Way

In a warfighting military, there are certain things you should save money on and certain things you shouldn’t. Cheap toilet paper at bootcamp? That’s a yes. No vehicle armor? That’s a no. The DoD’s argument, as made by former Sec. Harvey above, is that it costs too much money to fight a war with actual soldiers.

I admit, I’m skeptical about his math. Even if every soldier got the two years home stay claimed above, let’s say the DoD pays one civilian $80,000- a modest estimate- to fix generators at Al Asad. If we assume that a generator mechanic in the military gets paid about $30,000 including the cost of his benefits- a generous estimate- then we could have hired at least another mechanic. Both of these salaries are tax-exempt.

After salary, we come to the main argument for contractors: that the services supplied to each soldier in the combat theater are expensive. Let’s break it down: today troops are living in air-conditioned prefab trailers, eating steak and crab legs on Sundays and drinking soda charged to the DoD at $40 a case. You know how previous generations of American soldiers used to live? In tents, eating rations, and drinking water made by other soldiers, which is ironically, exactly how I trained and lived throughout my time in the military, except when in Iraq. As it is, the cost of supporting these “extra” soldiers is so high only because of the services the contractors themselves are providing. Pizza is not combat service support.


As Mac discussed last week, and I have written about before, the real cost of fighting a war with hired guns and hired hands is not monetary. It’s the cost of losing a counterinsurgency because you’ve let mercenaries shoot at civilians without punishment and interrogators waterboard detainees. It’s the cost of losing demoralized soldiers who leave the service in the hopes of quintupling their salaries as contractors- who see no reason to fight for their country when they could do it for nearly $100,000 tax-free and on their own terms. It’s being known as the country that hires African mercenaries to guard its bases, Nepalese to pump toilets and sell flat screen TVs at the PX, and the country that tried to find a way to fight a war on the cheap, or worse, make it profitable for itself.


Cui Bono

Smedley Butler was one of America’s most heroic warriors. He was the only Marine officer to ever receive two Medals of Honor, and historians agree he should have received a third; at the end of his career he became an ardent pacifist. In 1939, as a retired general, he wrote War Is a Racket, a scathing indictment of the companies that make money off war:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. For very few this racket…brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people- who do not profit. [Pgs. 23, 26]

There are hundreds of companies selling billions of dollars of material and services to the US government in "support" of this war from lithium flashlights to Burger King Whoppers. Make no mistake, this war is a boon for defense contractors, but only because the US government and its citizens allow it to be. Appropriately, Gen. Butler's family republished his book in 2003.


Further Reading & Viewing: Mac (Contractors part 1 of 3) Ben on Mercenaries on 2 Dinar Oct 07 NY Times AP Via Herald Tribune BBC Washington Post 2 Dinar on War Is a Racket C-SPAN Iraq For Sale

In 1963, retired Army Colonel T. R. Fehrenbach published This Kind of War. A veteran infantryman who held command in Korea from the platoon to battalion level, Fehrenbach’s treatise is a scathing indictment of the American military and American society. It is also a tragic retelling of America’s forgotten war, in which the same number of Americans perished as in Vietnam- but in one fifth the time.

Fehrenbach’s chief criticism was the American military’s remarkable lack of preparedness to face the North Korean and Chinese onslaught. Discipline was lax, weapons were rusty, and training was not tough enough to prepare men for the horrors they must face to succeed in combat. Fehrenbach wrote that:

“Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.” [Pg. 298]

This theme of legions- hardhearted professional soldiers as the core of military excellence- continues throughout Fehnrenbach’s book.

The war to create this country was fought by citizen soldiers and indeed, many of them are counted among our country’s most heralded warriors. Citizen soldiers serve their nation in time of need and afterwards return to their homes, jobs, and families. They are borne during times of great adversity, answering the call when their country is in its darkest hour.

The professional soldier is something very different, bridging the gap between wars of national survival and crusades of moral righteousness. In between these two undertakings is the most confusing of wars: the war of necessity. Citizen soldiers can be asked, but not expected, to rally around a war of necessity because their homes and families are not threatened. It is the professional soldier, who studies his craft like a monk studies holy writ, waiting for the 72 hour warning order to deploy. The professional soldier understands and embraces duty like the citizen soldier, but for the professional soldier, war is a way of life and warfighting is his trade.

What about those other warriors that have become an icon for modern American warfare- mercenaries? Like professional soldiers, mercenaries will fight for pay, but unlike professional soldiers, they fight only for pay. They are loyal only to their employer, and their services are available to the highest bidder. Citizen soldiers fight for their families and cities back home. Professional soldiers fight for their government’s rule of law and their nation’s way of life. Mercenaries fight for themselves; their own way of life.

Because of this, there has always been, and will always be, contempt for mercenaries among soldiers. Being a soldier means sacrificing to be part of and contribute to a system of national defense and putting faith in the elected civilians that control it. Mercenaries have no use for systems or sacrifice, unless they effect the bottom line. Most importantly, unlike soldiers, mercenaries have nothing to gain from the rule of law, peace, or security.


In his conclusion, Fehrenbach describes the modern legionary:

“The man who will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made. [Pg. 455]

America has legions. On Memorial Day the legionaries gather and remember their comrades who have fallen, who have sacrificed so that they may go on. What do the mercenaries do?

In war, Fehrenbach writes, “For every time a nation or a people commits its sons to combat, it inevitably commits its full prestige, its hope for the future, and the continuance of its way of life, whatever it may be.” [Page 453]

If a nation is unwilling or unable to commit its sons as part of its full prestige, but instead must rely on soldiers of fortune to fill its needs, what does that say about the nation engaging in this combat? We have done this in Iraq, where the private “security contractors” have been given the thin veneer of legitimacy, but cannot ever truly be respected or trusted. The Ugandan mercenaries guarding our bases in central Iraq have nothing to gain from the end of combat, for peace means they lose their jobs. These men will not spend the grueling hours required to wage a successful counterinsurgency- the thankless pursuit of winning hearts and minds and chasing a phantom foe. Their battles are about winning clients and delivering services.

If we as a nation are to consider sending our young men to die for a cause, let us make sure that they are our young men.