Showing papers in "Policy Review in 2013"

Lessons from the Indian Wars

Abstract: BEGINNING WITH THE 1778 Treaty with the Delawares, the United States engaged in some 375 treaties with Native Americans. While many were concluded hopefully, even earnestly, none ended well for Indian tribes. From George Washington forward, American presidents were confronted with the problem of Americans coveting and taking Indian land. Moreover, from the time of the French and Indian War in 1754, what would become the American army was fighting Indians. Subjugating those Indians was a challenge of enormous magnitude: Only 5,000 soldiers patrolled a million square miles that was home to 200,000 to 300,000 Indians. And the Indians were generally more proficient at warfare. Soldiers fighting successive tribes of Indians as white settlers moved south and west to occupy the continent were mostly militia, with little prior experience of warfare. By contrast, most Indian tribes fought as their profession. As S. C. Gwynne emphasizes in Empire of the Summer Moon, "American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them." Yet the United States had innumerable advantages it could bring to bear against the Indians: wealth, numbers, technology, industrial organization. Why did it take so long--over a hundred years--to do so? The answer is a complicated story, interweaving policy and military failures, failures of understanding and execution, and throughout it all an obdurate unwillingness of Americans on the frontier to uphold their government's policy. The Indian Wars were finally won with the combination of simplified objectives, ruthless prosecution by both military and economic means, and international cooperation to preclude sanctuaries from which tribes could operate. But the lessons, and especially the military lessons, were there from the start. These lessons are immediately relevant to the war we are fighting in Afghanistan. Nor are the lessons of the Indian Wars solely applicable to countering insurgencies. When asked by George Marshall in 1942 how the Army should train for pivoting from the war in Europe to the Pacific, the commander of the Marines on Guadalcanal answered "go back to the tactics of the French and Indian days ... study their tactics and fit in our modem weapons, and you have a solution." Many would now prefer to consider this kind of war a narrow subset of the spectrum of conflict; the Defense Department's 2012 strategic guidance concludes the United States will no longer engage in large-scale counterinsurgencies. Yet the impediments to winning the Indian Wars will be impediments to winning any kind of war. They have to do with an unwillingness by political leaders to acknowledge the scope and contradictory nature of their strategic objectives; an enormous gap between the campaign's objectives and the resources political leaders are willing to put toward the effort; dramatic overestimation of the capacity of our government to effectively carry out a sophisticated policy with political, economic, and military elements; corruption delegitimizing the idealistic components of the policy designed to win support of "reconcileables"; military gains far outpacing civilian agencies' ability to capitalize on them; existence of safe havens because of our inability to bring border states into cooperation; insularity in Washington against the consequences of the policy's failures, which are principally borne by others; a military hesitant to credit their adversaries with superior tactics and even strategy; a cost-exchange ratio significantly favoring the enemy and therefore making our strategy episodically followed and their strategy more sustainable over time; ideological unwillingness to adjust the strategy to one more in line with conditions and resources. In fact, these are the same impediments preventing us winning the Afghan war. In the beginning WASHINGTON AND HIS Virginians were beaten back from Ft. …

Investing in Bad Science

Abstract: THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT expends vast amounts of money on "research" of innumerable kinds. Many of these expenditures are unwise and unwarranted, falling into the category of pork or overlapping with work that would otherwise be performed by private-sector entities. Public funding for scientific research should largely be limited to basic scientific discoveries or proof-of-principle experiments--which would reasonably be defined as public goods--rather than efforts to extend science into marketable technologies or products. From an economic perspective, one can justify government funding for public goods because they are far enough removed from "fencing" through intellectual property rights that no individual or company has sufficient economic incentive to pay for the research. If an entity cannot capture at least part of the financial gains from the research investment, the research, in effect, supplies information on which anyone can capitalize. No one ought to be able to monopolize basic scientific principles or natural phenomena, and our intellectual property regime does, in fact, attempt to prevent that. (The recent Supreme Court decision in Mayo v. Prometheus reiterates that point.) However, there is a far less persuasive rationale for government funding of research that can be fenced sufficiently to provide a return on investment, and there are other critical determinants--in the sense of limitations--of what research should legitimately be federally funded. It should a) follow recognized experimental methodologies, b) be in the national interest, and c) focus on nontrivial questions or problems. As discussed below, these spare and seemingly obvious criteria are often controverted. And although such exceptions to sound principles represent a small percentage of overall federal research funding, in a time of belt-tightening at the nation's premier research organizations the dollar amounts could make a real difference to legitimate, high-quality research. Moreover, the fact that certain organizations are systematic and serial offenders cries out for reform. Golden fleece vs. golden goose FROM 1975 TO 1987, Democratic Senator William Proxmire presented monthly "Golden Fleece Awards" to identify what he viewed as wasteful government spending. Since then, many politicians and other critics of federal spending have blasted various government-funded research projects. Some of these criticisms clearly have been wrong-headed. An example is this dismissal of a supposedly unworthy research project by former Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin: "Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." The problem is that Palin didn't know what she didn't know. A century of studies on the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, an organism that shares about half of its genes with humans, has yielded information critical to understanding the process of aging and how genes work. In order to call attention to this sort of misapprehension, several congressmen from both sides of the aisle have gotten together with various research advocacy organizations to create the "Golden Goose Awards" to "highlight the often unexpected or serendipitous nature of basic scientific research by honoring federally funded researchers whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefitting society in significant ways." Jim Cooper, the congressman behind the idea, clarified the award's intention: "We've all seen reports that ridicule odd-sounding research projects as examples of government waste. The Golden Goose Award does the opposite. It recognizes that a valuable federally funded research project may sound funny, but its purpose is no laughing matter." Cooper and Alan Leshner, who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, penned a precious little op-ed in the Washington Post to describe the rationale for the award and to announce this year's winners. …

The Post-Soviet Twilight

Abstract: 0N NOVEMBER 16, 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met reluctantly in Moscow for the annual German-Russian summit. It was widely reported that the summit, which had already been abbreviated to a few hours, did not go well. In reality, the summit succeeded in contradicting itself. Merkel infuriated Putin by suggesting that the imprisonment of the members of punk rock band Pussy Riot might be a human rights violation. This caused Putin to cite Pussy Riot as a case of illegal anti-Semitism which, he suggested, would be something Germany should understand. Despite the apparent political antagonism, the Summit concluded with German industrial giant Siemens signing a 2.5 billion euro deal with the Russian state railway for 675 railroad engines. What is so remarkable about the outcome--Merkel playing to idealism, Putin pandering to nationalism, and both agreeing on trade--is that the November summit was the product of a hard-fought strategic review in Berlin pitting human rights romantics against economic pragmatists. Neither side won nor altered the uncomfortable status quo in any recognizable way. Several weeks earlier, long-awaited parliamentary elections in Ukraine also produced a nonresult. Both Washington and Brussels had been waiting for at least a year for the conduct of the elections to reveal whether or not the Ukrainian authorities heard and understood the criticism of Kyiv's atrocious political manners, including the selective prosecution of opposition figures. In the event, the elections were mostly free and fair but also imperfect and inconclusive. Yulia Timoshenko, the object of Western affection, remained in jail; and President Yanukovych, the object of our annoyance, remained in power. In retrospect, it is clear that sometime during the summer of 2008, between the failed NATO Summit in the spring and the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian War that August, consensus among Western leaders about what do with the post-Soviet world disappeared. Since then, Western policy towards the post-Soviet world and the "Eastern Partners" of the European Union has been characterized by the universal dissatisfaction of the West with its own policy. The dispiriting and inconclusive stasis of this year's German-Russian summit and the October elections in Ukraine are grudgingly accepted as both metaphor for our times and confirmation that we are going nowhere. How we came to this slough of geopolitical despond and the twists and turns of how policy failed is an interesting story. The first chapter might well be entitled "Irrational Exuberance," referring to the initial period of enthusiasm for the nascent post-Soviet democracies beginning with the Rose Revolution in 2004. In that year, American politicians rushed to praise the impetuous President Misha Saakashvili and Georgian democracy with the urgency and decorum of shoppers in Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. When the Orange Revolution came along a year later, not to be outdone, Prime Minister Tony Blair offered EU membership to Ukraine days after the inauguration of President Yushchenko. By 2007, however, the bloom was already off the rose, at least in Georgia. Despite President Bush's uplifting rhetoric on the inevitability of democratic transformation, his speech in Tbilisi's Freedom Square had a fin de siecle quality. The president did not look up from his text when someone threw an old Soviet grenade at the stage during his speech, which due to its age and shoddy manufacture did not explode, but bounced around unnoticed in the crowd until a security guard tossed it into the derelict Soviet-era subway. The poorly-fused grenade clattering into the darkness of a forgotten Soviet subway in the Caucasus is as good a metaphor for the new period of disappointment as there is readily to hand. President Bush's propensity to overstate his case, particularly on the transformative powers of the American model of democracy, ended up highlighting the fragmentation that was occurring in the policies of the West towards the post-Soviet world. …