Phil Carter at Intel Dump posts a fascinating and disturbing analysis of the report on how the 507th Maintenance Company went astray and its members wound up killed or taken prisoner. The bottom line:
Summary: I don't want to keep picking on support units, but in this case, I see a trend. Support units work hard in peacetime to keep our equipment running, often to the neglect of their own field training. The result is that they do not meet the standard for basic soldiering and warfighting skills. Of course, they learn through trial and error just like every unit. But the result of waiting to learn these lessons in wartime is that young Americans die as the unit climbs the learning curve. Our Army needs to embrace the warrior ethos in all units -- not just the combat arms -- and it needs to ensure that every unit can fight its way out of an ambush like this one.In the end, none of this may have made the crucial difference and saved the convoy. War is chaotic, and bad things happend to good units who do everything right. But commanders strive to set their units up for success; to do everything possible to make the fight an unfair one -- for the enemy. Training, maintenance, pre-combat checks, pre-combat inspections, and fieldcraft are what enable good units to execute when the time comes on the battlefield. The 507th Maintenance Convoy failed in these areas, and the effects were devastating.
That's the conclusion, but the details make it meaningful--so read the whole thing. My favorite example of bad management:
(2) Lubrication. It's not enough to clean the M16 rifle, M249 squad automatic weapon, or M2 .50 cal machine gun -- you also have to regularly apply lubricant in order to keep the metal parts moving against each other. The standard military lubricant for small arms is called "CLP" (See this discussion regarding CLP at Winds of Change). It worked okay for me in Korea and Texas, but not well. My platoon sergeant (an avid hunter) liked to use special commercially-available lubricants that he knew worked better. Apparently, he knew more than the Army's procurement folks. In the weeks since the war, several after action reviews have concluded that the Army's standard weapons lube was inadequate for the job in the desert.
Lubricant: Soldiers provided consistent comments that CLP was not a good choice for weapons maintenance in this environment. The sand is as fine as talcum powder here. The CLP attracted the sand to the weapon. ... Soldiers considered a product called MiliTec to be a much better solution for lubricating individual and crew-served weapons.
Various current and former military officers echoed this report, saying that CLP was one of the worst lubricants the Army could buy for the desert...
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 11, 2003 • Comments
Writing on NRO, Randy Barnett argues that Justice Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence v. Texas is a very, very big deal--for reasons having little to do with gay rights. The decision, he argues, marks the overthrow of New Deal jurisprudence and restores the centrality of liberty to constitutional law. It shifts the burden of justification for government action from the citizen who objects to the government that wants to intervene.
With this as the baseline, the onus then falls on the government to justify the restriction of liberty. Once an action is deemed to be a proper exercise of liberty (as opposed to license), the burden shifts to the government. Though he never acknowledges it, Justice Kennedy here is employing what I have called a "presumption of liberty" that requires the government to justify its restriction on liberty, instead of requiring the citizen to establish that the liberty being exercised is somehow "fundamental."
You should read the whole thing, but here's the conclusion:
In the end, Lawrence is a very simple ruling. Justice Kennedy examined the conduct at issue to see if it was properly an aspect of liberty (as opposed to license), and then asked the government to justify its restriction, which it failed adequately to do. The decision would have been far more transparent if Justice Kennedy had acknowledged what was really happening (though perhaps this would have lost some votes by other justices). Without this acknowledgement, the revolutionary aspect of his opinion is concealed, and it is rendered vulnerable to the ridicule of the dissent. Far better would have been to more closely track the superb amicus brief of the Cato Institute which he twice cites approvingly.
If the Court is serious, the effect on other cases of this shift from "privacy" to "liberty," and away from the New Deal-induced tension between "the presumption of constitutionality" and "fundamental rights," could be profound. For example, the medical-marijuana cases now wending their way through the Ninth Circuit would be greatly affected if those seeking to use or distribute medical marijuana pursuant to California law did not have to show that their liberty to do so was somehow "fundamental"--and if the government was forced to justify its restriction on that liberty. While wrongful behavior (license) could be prohibited, rightful behavior (liberty) could be regulated provided that the regulation was shown to be necessary and proper.
For Lawrence v. Texas to be constitutionally revolutionary, however, the Court's defense of liberty must not be limited to sexual conduct. The more liberties it protects, the less ideological it will be and the more widespread political support it will enjoy. Recognizing a robust "presumption of liberty" might also enable the court to transcend the trench warfare over judicial appointments. Both Left and Right would then find their favored rights protected under the same doctrine. When the Court plays favorites with liberty, as it has since the New Deal, it loses rather than gains credibility with the public.
(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 10, 2003 • Comments
If you can't get married, you save a lot on taxes. Research by economists James Alm, M.V. Lee Badgett, and the late Leslie Whittington (who was killed in the plane that hit the Pentagon on September 11), estimates that legalizing single-sex marriages "would lead to an annual increase in federal government income taxes of between $0.3 billion and $1.3 billion, with the likely impact toward the higher range of the estimates." The paper, titled "Wedding Bell Blues," can be downloaded from Jim Alm's website. (Alm et al. are known for their research on what economists call "marriage non-neutrality" and politicians call the marriage penalty.)
Just think what legalizing gay marriage could do for California's budget crisis...
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 10, 2003 • Comments
The new issue of Esquire (with the J.Lo pinup cover) features a series of photos of Democratic presidential candidates "in their natural habitats." We see Dick Gephardt, his wife, and daughters cooking a super high-fat dish called "party chicken," Bob Graham playing with his grandkids, Al Sharpton and his wife at their favorite soul-food place, and so on. The captions, by photographer Michael Edwards, describe how the shots were set up, and they generally make the candidates sound like pleasant guys--with one big exception. I did not make this first sentence up:
Senator Kerry's initial idea for the shoot was to pose with his wife on the type of gunboat he captained in the Vietnam War. But in the end, the choice of location was dictated by when I could actually get the senator and his wife in the same place. When I entered his house in Washington, I was impressed by the art collection. It seemed every wall was adorned with a Dutch master or an exotic artifact. The senator's press people were conscious of this and didn't want the shot to seem overdone, so there were various discussions about where to shoot. When he entered the phone, he had his phone to his ear, where it remained for most of the shoot. He told me it was an ambassador on the other end and at one point offered me the hang-loose sign with his free hand. And for most of the shoot he had a very "go go go" attitude, but at the same time, he seemed a bit like a grown-up kid, flopping down on the chair, throwing his leg over the armrest, loosening his tie a bit.
Kerry is on the phone in the photo, looking away from the camera, while his wife faces forward and gestures as though she's throwing something at us. Compared even to the awkward-looking Howard Dean, it's not a flattering picture. Kerry seems self-absorbed, and his wife seems weird. As Mickey Kaus has often said, people just don't like that guy.
BTW, on p. 32 in the same issue, Esquire's list of "Things a Man Should Never Do Past the Age of 30" includes, as item #3, "Flash the hang-loose hand sign, even if he is actually hanging loose." Nope, they don't like him at all.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 09, 2003 • Comments
In his most recent column, my friend Jacob Sullum makes a point about marriage that is both true and incomplete: Marriage does not inherently require state approval.
After all, people have been getting married for thousands of years, while the marriage license is a relatively recent development. A sacrament requires God's blessing, not the government's, and that's the way it should be in any society that respects religious freedom.
Suppose a religious group decides to perform weddings between people of the same sex. Since Roman Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Muslims, and Jews would not be forced to recognize such arrangements as true marriages, it's hard to see why they would have grounds to complain.
Likewise if same-sex couples benefited from the "legal incidents" of marriage that gay people understandably want to enjoy: the ability to adopt children together, to approve medical treatment for each other, to inherit each other's property, and so on. Allowing two men or two women to enter into a contract that provides such benefits does not compel anyone to change their moral views about homosexuality or their religious understanding of marriage.
I'm all for the movement from status to contract, in this as in many other aspects of life. But even business contracts implicate third parties, from creditors to employees. Business contracts also have default provisions embodied in common law and the Uniform Commercial Code, thereby making it easier to enter into and enforce contracts. A real contract, as opposed to an idealized libertarian argument, is messy and inherently incomplete. That's why a huge body of common law has developed, even in commercial relations.
Moving marriage from a one-size-fits-all standard contract (or a status relationship) to something more personalizable wouldn't make the problems of third-party relationships disappear. To take a relatively simple example, Wal-Mart has adopted a policy against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but it does not extend benefits to gay partners. Instead, it uses the existing state definition of "marriage" to define who gets benefits. If such a default definition didn't exist, the company would have to make a case-by-case determination of spousehood. That would be so cumbersome and costly that the most likely result would be no recognition of any marriages at all.
Nor, barring a move to anarchist utopia, can the government remain utterly uninvolved. It, too, uses existing family law to govern all sorts of other decisions. Here, I find David Frum inadvertently making the argument for gay marriage even as he calls for a constitutional amendment banning it:
So we need to take preventive measures by writing marriage into the U.S. Constitution. Some proponents of same-sex marriage will say that this act is premature--they recommend that marital traditionalists wait until later, when it will of course be too late. Others take up the federalism argument, urging that each state be allowed to make its own decisions. In this case, though, federalism simply means letting the most liberal state in the country make policy for the other 49. Marriage impinges on immigration law, the Social Security Act, federal tax law, and federal criminal law, among thousands of other areas of jurisdiction. There can and will be only one standard for marriage in the United States--and it will be all one way or all the other.
David is right. Marital status affects all kinds of public policies just as, say, adoption law does. That means the inability to legally marry the person you love affects many more aspects of your life than those the two of you can govern by private contract. If, say, you and your other half are Canadian nationals, and you get a job in Washington, no spousal residency privileges come with your permission to work in this country. The two of you have to live apart. (This exact dilemma is why conservative essayist Bruce Bawer lives in Norway.) To someone who believes in committed relationships--or to a love-struck romantic like me--that is incredibly mean.
The policy argument about gay marriage is ultimately an argument over whether the heterosexual majority will extend its moral sympathy to include homosexuals: whether we will identify with the "you and your other half" in that sentence above. Do we think it's a terrible thing for the law to break up loving couples? Or do we think that gay couples aren't real couples (or, perhaps, real people)?
On that question, yet another blog item suggests that experience in fact begets empathy. This month Dallas Morning News started publishing gay commitment announcements on its wedding pages. Anticipating the announcement, Wick Allison, the editor and publisher of D Magazine and the former publisher of National Review (with the requisite NR politics and religion), wrote:
A Belo source tells us the News will begin, ala the NYTimes, running same-sex "commitment" announcements on the wedding and engagement pages starting July 1. I was ambivalent on this subject--partly from dislike of innovation, partly out of a feeling that marriage as an institution is somehow diminished--until the Times launched theirs. The very first couple the Times featured included Christopher Lione, my art director from Art & Antiques. My ambivalence disappeared; my only feeling was one of delight for Christopher. There are, of course, still legal and theological issues galore. But in the tangle of conflicting interests, surely personal happiness and stability are values to be cherished and upheld.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 09, 2003 • Comments
With Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds flooding the zone with reports and links, I don't have much to add to the July 9 focus on the struggle for freedom in Iran. I'll be watching tomorrow's LAT to see how much coverage the paper gives to the story, which is not only internationally significant but of keen interest to the huge Iranian community in L.A. Large demonstrations against the Iranian government are nothing new in Westwood--but that doesn't mean they aren't news.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 09, 2003 • Comments
The Long Beach Press-Telegram is spitting mad about the spreading meme that Californians must choose between higher taxes and no basic services:
By presenting the public with only two choices, higher taxes or dramatic cuts in vital services, state politicians and special interest groups are taking a page from an age-old political storybook, absolving themselves of blame and scaring the public into believing it's up to them to solve the state's budget problems. Take your pick, people: Either pay more or prepare for a crime wave. Pay more or deal with a generation of uneducated kids. Pay more or get ready to toss frail seniors into the gutter. Are you really that cold-hearted? What an infuriating, self- serving ruse....
The state has been unwilling to play by the most basic financial rules you can't spend more than you earn without running into severe problems. During the dot-com boom politicians gave systematic favors to the special-interest groups that finance their campaigns, like the prison guards union, jacking up their budgets, salaries and pensions way beyond anything necessary for inflation or population increases. The numbers tell the real story: State spending has increased 40 percent in the last four years alone, as revenues increased 25 percent (spending for inflation and population alone would have increased the budget 21 percent).
Read the whole thing.
Riffing off an LAT article, CalPundit illustrates the mentality that led to this mess. Every feel-good idea becomes politically untouchable, and every program is assumed to a) achieve its goals and b) be the only way to achieve its goals. His favorite, and mine, is the $50/month payment to blind people for dog food: "[Republicans are] proposing to eliminate dog food for blind people? I can see the TV ads already." Now think about that. Sure, blind people may need dog food. But they need shampoo, deodorant, electricity, and computer equipment too. Does every need require a special--and untouchable--appropriation? Isn't that what disability payments are for?
This attitude doesn't just protect nice-sounding programs to support dogs and blind people. It also protects the powerful prison-guard lobby. Deny them anything and you'll see crime running rampant. Who could be against more money for prison guards?
The Reason Public Policy Institute has a special website section devoted to the California budget crisis here.
I'm now going home to Texas, where there's no income tax and they still build roads to handle the traffic.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 08, 2003 • Comments
Blogger David Weigel writes to say that he was onto the rhetorical uses of Ann Coulter first. His roundup starts, "Ann Coulter's become a useful tool for people who don't like conservatives."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 07, 2003 • Comments
Andrew Sullivan discovers the downside of media plenitude. It rewards extreme rhetoric and sloppy factual claims.
In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas - in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news - it's increasingly hard to stand out. Coulter's answer to that dilemma is two-fold: look amazing and ratchet up the rhetoric against the left until it has the subtlety and nuance of a car alarm. The left, in turn, has learned the lesson, which is why the fraud and dissembler, Michael Moore, has done so well.
Spinsanity makes a similar analogy, minus the explanation:
Treason is the culmination of a dismaying trend toward factually misleading and inflammatory books from pundits such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage....These authors may delight partisans and make their publishers rich, but their work impoverishes our political discourse.
The analogy between Coulter and Moore is a telling one, but it misses an important disparity. Powerful liberal voices like the NYT tend to ignore Moore (though not as much as they ignore Noam Chomsky). But they find Coulter impossible to resist. She's a publicity magnet, because she confirms all their prejudices. Here's Frank Rich's latest reward for her rhetorical excesses. He not only panders to his readers' belief that conservatives are irresponsible idiots, but by doing so he confirms the prejudices of Coulter's readers as well. It's a perfect arrangement.
There is only one (partial) solution to this "impoverish[ment] of our political discourse." Just say no to reviews of and columns on stupid books. Discuss something more interesting. Easy advice to give. Hard to follow.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 06, 2003 • Comments
Every day, I get the political headlines from California's major newspapers by email. And every day, I'm struck by how immature--no, how bratty--the state's policy process is. California hasn't lost its magic. To the contrary, it's possessed by magical thinking--assuming you can just wish for things and get them, with no costs and no tradeoffs.
The dean of the state's political writers, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, recently proposed a solution. His column carried the headline "We act like a Third World nation--so treat us like one":
Here's a thought: When the World Bank is finished with Chad, it should come to California, whose public finances these days resemble those of a Third World corruption pit more than those of a modern, presumably enlightened, industrial society.
When Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature received a $12 billion windfall of tax revenues in 2000 they, like the ruling clique of an oil-boom nation, lavished it on the politically connected with no thought as to the long-term consequences. Now California has an immense budget deficit, is dependent entirely on loans from out-of-state bankers and is locked in a seemingly intractable political war over the crisis.
The state will begin a new fiscal year Tuesday without a budget in place, and few in the Capitol doubt that it will be many weeks, perhaps months, before the underlying conflicts are resolved. In the meantime, those dependent on Sacramento for money--schools, local governments, the poor, medical care providers, etc.--will be scrambling to survive. Despite the immensity of its economy and its riches, in other words, California finds itself in exactly the same condition as one of the World Bank's basket cases.
The fiscal crisis is just one manifestation of California's magical thinking. I returned to my L.A. condo to find a notice from neighbors agitating against a developer's plans to raze a couple of older apartment buildings and replace 10 apartments and no parking with 24 condos and 60 parking spaces. They have all sorts of concerns about "the scale and character of the existing stable neighborhood," which would in fact be slightly altered by the new construction. (In reality, the neighborhood's character is largely maintained by the single-family zoning that begins one block to the south.)
Here's the magical thinking paragraph: "The project will continue the decline in affordable housing on the Westisde. Replacing 10 highly desirable rental buildings in the range of $1000-$1700 per month, by condos offered for $500,000-$550,000, will adversely impact a renter profile of students, artists, young workers and seniors, who are being driven out of the Westside by high housing costs." [Weird commas in the original--vp.]
These concerned neighbors are not offering to sell their tiny bungalows for less than a half million dollars--or, for that matter, to rent them out for "affordable housing." Instead, they want to block an increase in the number of multifamily units, which offer relatively more space and luxury for the money. In the magical twist, they imagine that limiting supply while demand is skyrocketing is the way to create affordable housing.
Of course, if they succeed, it will be good for the Postrels, if not for the general public, since we still own the old but spacious condo we bought at the bottom of the market. I suspect we aren't the only ones aware of the financial advantages of limiting competition.
On a positive note, Steve dropped by UCLA today and a former colleague told him that California's energy crisis disappeared as soon as consumer electricity prices rose. Now peak prices are very high, and people are careful about what they use. The price system works! It must be magic!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2003 • Comments