Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – In 2010, when I was part of the San Francisco Chronicle’s “City Brights” blogging team, I wrote a post that I can’t find on the SFGate.com site anymore today, but was captured by the Wayback Machine. I wrote that General Stanley McChrystal was not a systems thinker and because he made a crack about the giant system dynamics model diagram above and said “Now, if we understand that, we’d have won the war” referring to the War In Afghanistan.
In City Brights, I wrote the following:
The simple fact that McChrystal didn’t understand the slide is why we’re not only not winning the war, but not seeing that we should not be in Afghanistan. The seeds of the reasons why are actually in the system dynamics model. If Gen McChrystal understood systems thinking, and then system dynamics, he would have asked for a computer to run the model, rather than joke about a picture.
If he did, he would have seen a the impact of the part of the model called “Popular Support.” One of the key factors in that variable area is something that is just called “anger” with both the US Government and the Afghan Government.
The idea is that by the government helping the economy and infrastructure, this anger is reduced. But then insurgents destroying that same infrastructure harm this effort. So what happens if you just took the US Government out of the picture? In other words, just remove “Coalition Capacity and Priorities”, which would cause the elimination of “Coalition Domestic Support” and we remove the factor the Afghan population’s reacting to in the model: the United States.
The problem with the model is it’s designed to show how US and Coalition forces can impact Afghanistan, but then it implies our very existence in the region is pissing some of them off, causing a set of problems that we have to spend money to deal with.
That take of mine triggered a man I never met named Richard Veryard. Mr. Veryard is a United Kingdom-based data architect and researcher. He disagreed with my take, writing the following in his blog on Thursday, July 10th, 2010:
Surely if McChrystal didn’t want to be in Afghanistan, the obvious course of action would be to give an interview to Rolling Stone that would get him fired. And although Ahmed Rashid calls this a “hurtful rumour” (Petraeus’s Baby, New York Blog, 14 July 2010), this is exactly what some commentators are suggesting.
“McChrystal gave the interview in order that he be fired. And why did he want to be fired? He wanted to be fired because he knew that the policies he was pursuing and championing in the war in Afghanistan were not working, could not work. And he didn’t want to be the one tarnished with the public blame.” (Immanuel Wallerstein, Why McChrystal Did It, Middle East Online, 1st July 2010)
So maybe McChrystal is a systems thinker after all. POSIWID.
Richard Veryard Is Wrong About (Ret.) Gen Stanley McChristal and His Assumed Understanding Of Systems Thinking
The trouble with Mr. Veryard’s 2010 post and that entry about General McChrystal wanting to get fired, if he did, it was not because he wanted out of Afghanistan, it was because he wanted to launch a much bigger offensive than President Obama gave him the go-ahead to do.
I found something written by General McChrystal and called “Headquarters, International Security Assistance Force, Kabul, Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Subject: “Commander’s Initial Assessment,” August 30, 2009, Confidential, 66 pp.” and placed online by the National Security Archive. The National Security Archive then offered this description:
Date
Aug 30, 2009
Description
This is the key document behind the Obama “surge” in Afghanistan that produced the highest U.S. troop levels in the whole 20-year war. President Obama’s holdover Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had abruptly fired the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, after only 11 months, and replaced him with a Special Operations general named Stanley McChrystal, a favorite of Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus, and an acolyte of the Petraeus counterinsurgency approach that had apparently succeeded in Iraq (critics said top Iraqi clerics had simply ordered a truce, for their own reasons). This 66-page assessment had a convoluted public history: written in August 2009, it leaked to the Washington Post in September, likely as part of Pentagon pressure on Obama to approve more troops, and the Pentagon declassified it right away. The McChrystal strategy called for a “properly resourced” counterinsurgency campaign, with at least 40,000 and as many as 60,000 more U.S. troops and massive aid, especially to build up the Afghan army. He wrote, “I believe the short-term fight will be decisive. Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”
McChrystal asked for 60,000 troops, Obama gave him 30,000 but with an 18-month deadline before they would start coming home, and neither the surge nor the deadline ever produced any “maturity” in Afghan security capacity. Testifying to the Senate in December 2009, McChrystal flatly declared “the next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success. In fact, we are going to win.” His 66 pages remain a testament to American military hubris, full of questionable assumptions – that most Afghans saw the Taliban as oppressors and would side with a government installed by foreigners, that most Afghans shared a national identity, and that the Pakistan sanctuaries would not keep the Taliban going indefinitely.
Source
Declassified by Department of Defense, September 2009
So, given the giant surge that General McChrystal wanted and the comparatively small 30,000 troops President Obama authorized as kind of a test, it’s clear McChrystal was not happy with being constrained. As the National Security Archive wrote:
His 66 pages remain a testament to American military hubris, full of questionable assumptions – that most Afghans saw the Taliban as oppressors and would side with a government installed by foreigners, that most Afghans shared a national identity, and that the Pakistan sanctuaries would not keep the Taliban going indefinitely.
A good system dynamics model is complex enough to test ones “mental models” of a situation. From my experience, a bad system dynamics model only reinforces prejudice and leaves no chance for the development of any unexpected positive or negative feedback loop to occur. They wind up being “full of questionable assumptions” and nothing more. So, years later, my assertion that General Stanley McChrystal was not a systems thinker holds up to scrutiny.
Moreover, my take that we should not have been in Afghanistan at all in 2010, was proven to be right on, as President Biden finally pulled America out of a constantly losing campaign that only “won” us the ability to get back at the cause of 9-11, Osama Bin Ladin, but that’s about it. Here’s now Retired General McChrystal finally admitting that the effort was a failure:
So, for history’s sake, here’s my entire Zennie62 City Brights blog post:
Gen. Stanley McChrystal: McChrystal Is Not A Systems Thinker
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?blogid=95&entry_id=66659#ixzz0sJyVQ2mE
In the wake of President Barack Obama’s sacking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and due to comments in Rolling Stone magazine from McChrystal and his subordinates that were negative and derogatory toward the President and civilian military officers, an April 26, 2010 New York Times article takes on new meaning. Indeed, it should have been a indication to President Obama that he had the wrong man in charge, assuming Obama saw the article. And why is that?
Gen. Stanley McChrystal is not a systems thinker
The article has two titles, reflecting the New York Times‘ bumbling when it comes to digital media. The page title best for search is “Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com, and the title on the page itself is the one most referred to: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” (As an aside, the best search-oriented title should have been “PowerPoint fails in US Afghanistan Briefing.”)
The centerpiece of the article is a giant system dynamics (or “SD”) causal relationship diagram (presented above) that shows how key factors and actions in Afghanistan are interrelated. The New York Times author apparently does not know that it’s a system dynamics model, because she does not refer to it, but to the place the SD model diagram is on: PowerPoint.
The article takes off on PowerPoint, while missing the real problem: it’s a really a model that can be ran and we can see the graph and statistical outcomes of different decisions. You need a computer and a presentation projector and a place to run the model like the platforms provided by Forio Business Simulations. Then you need to run the model and test different decisions.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal joked about the diagram
Instead of that, this is what happened according to the New York Times‘ Elisabeth Bumiller:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The simple fact that McChrystal didn’t understand the slide is why we’re not only not winning the war, but not seeing that we should not be in Afghanistan. The seeds of the reasons why are actually in the system dynamics model. If Gen McChrystal understood systems thinking, and then system dynamics, he would have asked for a computer to run the model, rather than joke about a picture.
If he did, he would have seen a the impact of the part of the model called “Popular Support.” One of the key factors in that variable area is something that is just called “anger” with both the US Government and the Afghan Government.
The idea is that by the government helping the economy and infrastructure, this anger is reduced. But then insurgents destroying that same infrastructure harm this effort. So what happens if you just took the US Government out of the picture? In other words, just remove “Coalition Capacity and Priorities”, which would cause the elimination of “Coalition Domestic Support” and we remove the factor the Afghan population’s reacting to in the model: the United States.
The problem with the model is it’s designed to show how US and Coalition forces can impact Afghanistan, but then it implies our very existence in the region is pissing some of them off, causing a set of problems that we have to spend money to deal with.
If you want to see a one version of a simple type of the same SD diagram that takes you through how the factors are related, here’s a model created by Chris Soderquist for the IEE Systems Thinking Blog and Forio Business Simulations and presented in a blog post called “We have met an ally and it is storytelling“:
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?blogid=95&entry_id=66659#ixzz0sK4deKPU