Learning from Past Disasters, Preventing Future Ones
by Daniel Ellsberg, July 04, 2008
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This is a forward to the book Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental by Marc S. Gerstein.
I have participated in several major organizational catastrophes. The most well known of them is the Vietnam War. I was aware on my first visit to Vietnam in 1961 that the situation there – a failing neocolonial regime we had installed as a successor to French rule – was a sure loser in which we should not become further involved. Yet a few years later, I found myself participating as a high-level staffer in a policy process that lied both the public and Congress into a war that, unbeknownst to me at the time, experts inside the government accurately predicted would lead to catastrophe.
The very word catastrophe, almost unknown in the dry language of bureaucracy, was uttered directly to the president. Clark Clifford, longtime and highly trusted adviser to U.S. presidents, told President Lyndon Johnson in July 1965: “If we lose fifty thousand men there, it will be catastrophic in this country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men – this is not for us. . . .”
But it was for us, casualties included, after Johnson launched an open-ended escalation just three days later. In time, Clifford’s estimates were all exceeded: Before our ground war was ended in eight years (not five), the cost in dollars was in hundreds of billions, over five hundred thousand men served in Vietnam in a single year (1968) out of three million altogether, and – uncannily close to his predicted figure – more than fifty-eight thousand soldiers had died. Clifford’s prophecy in his face-to-face session with the president at Camp David – “I can’t see anything but catastrophe for our nation in this area” – could not have been more urgent in tone or, tragically, more prescient.
And Clifford’s was not a lone voice. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, had used almost the same words with him five months earlier; others, including Johnson’s career-long mentor Senator Richard Russell, had also made the same argument. Yet Johnson went ahead regardless.
Why? I have pondered and researched that question for forty years. (The documentation in the Pentagon Papers provides no adequate answer.) But one seemingly plausible and still widely believed answer can be ruled out. The escalation in Vietnam was not the result of a universal failure of foresight among the president’s advisers, or to a lack of authoritative, precise, and urgently expressed warnings against his choice of policy.
The nuclear arms race, in which I was intimately involved between 1958 and 1964 as a RAND Corporation analyst serving the executive branch, is a moral catastrophe on a scale without precedent in human history, even though its full tragic potential has not yet occurred. The arms race involved – under both Democratic and Republican administrations, soon joined by the USSR – the mutual construction of a physical and organizational capability for destruction of most of the world’s population within a matter of hours. That project – building two matched and opposed “doomsday machines” and keeping them on hair-trigger alert – is the most irresponsible policy in human experience, involving as it does a genuine possibility of creating an irreversible catastrophe for humanity and most other living species on a scale that the world has not seen since the dinosaurs perished sixty million years ago. Even if the system were decommissioned totally – and it is not yet remotely close to being dismantled – such a course of action would not cancel out the fact that over the past sixty years, a moral cataclysm has already occurred, with ominous implications for the future of life on earth.
I have been trying since 1967 – when I realized that the Vietnam War must end – to understand how we got into that war, and why it was so hard to end it. Since 1961, even earlier, I have viewed the nuclear arms race as an ongoing catastrophe that has to be reversed, and a situation that has to be understood. I assumed then, and still believe, that understanding the past and present of these realities is essential to changing them. In my life and work, I have tried to do what Dr. Gerstein’s book is trying to help us do: to understand these processes in a way that will help us avert them in the future.
A major theme to be gained from this important book is that organizations do not routinely and systematically learn from past errors and disasters – in fact, they rarely ever do. This intentional lack of oversight can partly explain why our predicament in Iraq is so precisely close to the Vietnam experience, both in the way that we got into the war, deceptively and unconstitutionally, and in the way the war is being conducted and prolonged.
It might not seem surprising that after thirty years, a generation of decision-makers and voters would have come along that knew little about the past experience in Vietnam. What is more dismaying is to realize that much the same processes – the same foolish and disastrous decision-making, the same misleading rationales for aggression – are going on right now with respect to Iran, with little political opposition, just three years after the invasion of Iraq, and while the brutal and tragic consequences of that occupation are still in front of our eyes every day.
One reason for this folly is that many aspects of disasters in decision-making are known only within the organization, and not even by many insiders at that. The organizations involved tend not to make relevant and detailed studies of past errors, let alone reveal them outside the organization. In fact, the risk that such a study or investigation might leak to the outside is a factor sufficient to keep inquiries from being made in the first place. Making or keeping possibly incriminating documentation earlier, at the time of the decision, or later is similarly sidestepped.
This deliberate decision within organizations not to try to learn internally what has gone wrong constitutes what I have called, with respect to Vietnam, an anti-learning mechanism. Avoiding improved performance is not the point of the mechanism. But because studying present and past faulty decision-making risks may invite blame and organizational, political, perhaps even legal penalties, those outcomes “outweigh” the benefits of clearly understanding what needs to be changed within the organization.
The valuable cases studies, analyses, and information in the pages of this book were not provided by the organizations involved. This compendium arose from the accounts of individual whistle-blowers, journalistic investigations, and in some cases congressional action – and from Dr. Gerstein’s own initiative in collecting and analyzing the data. Did any one of the organizations detailed herein conduct a comparable study? Quite possibly not a single one. And even if they did, they certainly didn’t publish the results in a way that would allow other organizations and individuals to learn from their mistakes.
Societally, then, we don’t have an easy way to learn from organizational mistakes of the past. That’s one reason that disasters are so likely, and why comparable disasters occur again and again, across organizations and even within the same organizations. In the case of Vietnam, Americans did not learn from the French or Japanese occupations before ours. Nor did Republicans under Nixon manage to learn from Democratic missteps before theirs. Specifically, there was no systematic study of the Pentagon Papers, which were available within the Defense Department to the Nixon administration, but no one ever admitted to having read them or even to directing their staff to analyze possible lessons from them. (I personally urged Henry Kissinger, in a discussion at the Western White House in 1970, to do both of these, or at least the latter, but he later claimed he had never read anything of them or about them, though he had a copy available to him.) As far as we know, Secretary of Defense Laird, Henry Kissinger, and others had no interest in the documentary record and analysis of twenty-three years of decision-making in the same geographic area, against precisely the same adversaries. And so they ended up committing many of the mistakes made by those who’d gone before, with the same results.
This “anti-learning” phenomenon also explains why it is possible to reproduce our experience in Vietnam years later in Iraq, and now, from Iraq to Iran. In sum, there is strong and successful resistance within many organizations to studying or recording past actions leading to catastrophe – because doing so would reveal errors, lies, or even crimes.
There is no substitute for the kind of comparative study analysis Dr. Gerstein shares on these pages. I hope this book is read widely; if we are to avoid the kinds of disasters and catastrophes described, we first need to understand them. Flirting with Disaster is a pathbreaking, indispensable step toward such a goal.
Daniel Ellsberg Berkeley, California July 2007
Saturday 12 March 2011
This Shameful Abuse of Bradley Manning
This Shameful Abuse of Bradley Manning
by Daniel Ellsberg, March 12, 2011
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President Obama tells us that he’s asked the Pentagon whether the conditions of confinement of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with leaking state secrets, "are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are."
If Obama believes that, he’ll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they’ve been behaving appropriately. I can just hear President Nixon saying to a press conference the same thing: "I was assured by the the White House Plumbers that their burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s doctor in Los Angeles was appropriate and met basic standards."
When that criminal behavior ordered from the Oval Office came out, Nixon faced impeachment and had to resign. Well, times have changed. But if President Obama really doesn’t yet know the actual conditions of Manning’s detention – if he really believes, as he’s said, that "some of this [nudity, isolation, harassment, sleep-deprivation] has to do with Private Manning’s wellbeing", despite the contrary judgments of the prison psychologist – then he’s being lied to, and he needs to get a grip on his administration.
If he does know, and agrees that it’s appropriate or even legal, that doesn’t speak well for his memory of the courses he taught on constitutional law.
The president refused to comment on PJ Crowley’s statement that the treatment of Manning is "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". Those words are true enough as far as they go – which is probably about as far as a state department spokesperson can allow himself to go in condemning actions of the defense department. But at least two other words are called for: abusive and illegal.
Crowley was responding to a question about the "torturing" of an American citizen, and, creditably, he didn’t rebut that description. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity – that’s right out of the manual of the CIA for "enhanced interrogation". We’ve seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It’s what the CIA calls "no-touch torture", and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralize someone to the point of offering a desired confession. That’s what they are after, I suspect, with Manning. They don’t care if the confession is true or false, so long as it implicates WikiLeaks in a way that will help them prosecute Julian Assange.
That’s just my guess, as to their motives. But it does not affect the illegality of the behavior If I’m right, it’s likely that such harsh treatment wasn’t ordered at the level of a warrant officer or the brig commander. The fact that they have continued to inflict such suffering on the prisoner despite weeks of complaint from his defense counsel, harsh publicity and condemnation from organizations such as Amnesty International, suggests to me that it might have come from high levels of the defense department or the justice department, if not from the White House itself.
It’s no coincidence that it’s someone from the state department who has gone off-message to speak out about this. When a branch of the US government makes a mockery of our pretensions to honor the rule of law, specifically our obligation not to use torture, the state department bears the brunt of that, as it affects our standing in the world.
The fact that Manning’s abusive mistreatment is going on at Quantico – where I spent nine months as a Marine officer in basic school – and that Marines are lying about it, makes me feel ashamed for the Corps. Just three years as an infantry officer was more than enough time for me to know that what is going on there is illegal behavior that must be stopped and disciplined
by Daniel Ellsberg, March 12, 2011
Email This | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum
President Obama tells us that he’s asked the Pentagon whether the conditions of confinement of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with leaking state secrets, "are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are."
If Obama believes that, he’ll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they’ve been behaving appropriately. I can just hear President Nixon saying to a press conference the same thing: "I was assured by the the White House Plumbers that their burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s doctor in Los Angeles was appropriate and met basic standards."
When that criminal behavior ordered from the Oval Office came out, Nixon faced impeachment and had to resign. Well, times have changed. But if President Obama really doesn’t yet know the actual conditions of Manning’s detention – if he really believes, as he’s said, that "some of this [nudity, isolation, harassment, sleep-deprivation] has to do with Private Manning’s wellbeing", despite the contrary judgments of the prison psychologist – then he’s being lied to, and he needs to get a grip on his administration.
If he does know, and agrees that it’s appropriate or even legal, that doesn’t speak well for his memory of the courses he taught on constitutional law.
The president refused to comment on PJ Crowley’s statement that the treatment of Manning is "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". Those words are true enough as far as they go – which is probably about as far as a state department spokesperson can allow himself to go in condemning actions of the defense department. But at least two other words are called for: abusive and illegal.
Crowley was responding to a question about the "torturing" of an American citizen, and, creditably, he didn’t rebut that description. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity – that’s right out of the manual of the CIA for "enhanced interrogation". We’ve seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It’s what the CIA calls "no-touch torture", and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralize someone to the point of offering a desired confession. That’s what they are after, I suspect, with Manning. They don’t care if the confession is true or false, so long as it implicates WikiLeaks in a way that will help them prosecute Julian Assange.
That’s just my guess, as to their motives. But it does not affect the illegality of the behavior If I’m right, it’s likely that such harsh treatment wasn’t ordered at the level of a warrant officer or the brig commander. The fact that they have continued to inflict such suffering on the prisoner despite weeks of complaint from his defense counsel, harsh publicity and condemnation from organizations such as Amnesty International, suggests to me that it might have come from high levels of the defense department or the justice department, if not from the White House itself.
It’s no coincidence that it’s someone from the state department who has gone off-message to speak out about this. When a branch of the US government makes a mockery of our pretensions to honor the rule of law, specifically our obligation not to use torture, the state department bears the brunt of that, as it affects our standing in the world.
The fact that Manning’s abusive mistreatment is going on at Quantico – where I spent nine months as a Marine officer in basic school – and that Marines are lying about it, makes me feel ashamed for the Corps. Just three years as an infantry officer was more than enough time for me to know that what is going on there is illegal behavior that must be stopped and disciplined
100,000 Reported at Sanaa University Alone
Another day-of-rage in Yemen has given way to another record turnout amongst protesters nationwide, as around 100,000 were reported at Sanaa University, the site of daily protests and daily violent crackdowns in the capital city.
But the protests of course were not confined to Sanaa, and massive rallies in cities like Taiz, Aden, and indeed elsewhere across the nation were reported as well. Protests have been a regular part of daily life across the city for over a month now, as Yemenis demand the ouster of long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Saleh has promised a series of reforms aimed at quieting the protests, including a pledge not to run for reelection and, yesterday, a promise of a new constitution and referendum by the end of the year.
The opposition, however, insists that it is far too late for such offers, and particularly in the wake of a violent crackdown that they cannot possibly accept anything short of Saleh’s complete ouster. Though he continues to insist that won’t happen, the pressure on the US-backed dictator is continuing to grow.
But the protests of course were not confined to Sanaa, and massive rallies in cities like Taiz, Aden, and indeed elsewhere across the nation were reported as well. Protests have been a regular part of daily life across the city for over a month now, as Yemenis demand the ouster of long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Saleh has promised a series of reforms aimed at quieting the protests, including a pledge not to run for reelection and, yesterday, a promise of a new constitution and referendum by the end of the year.
The opposition, however, insists that it is far too late for such offers, and particularly in the wake of a violent crackdown that they cannot possibly accept anything short of Saleh’s complete ouster. Though he continues to insist that won’t happen, the pressure on the US-backed dictator is continuing to grow.
Regime Forces Crack Down on Protesters Near Royal Palace
Fresh off a visit to Brussels, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Bahrain today for private talks with King Hamad, where he reportedly urged some unspecified reforms and talks with the massive protest movement demanding his ouster.
Pentagon officials insisted Gates’ visit was primarily to reassure King Hamad that the US is “committed” to their military presence in the nation (the island is home to America’s 5th fleet), and the calls for reform appear very secondary.
The calls for reforms may well have been embraced early on, when the protest movement was simply demanding improved conditions and more freedom. Since the violent crackdowns by the regime, however, the calls have increasingly been for a full ouster of the monarchy and its replacement with a democracy, something the US appears extremely averse to.
And the crackdowns are continuing today, as reports have police forces, backing with pro-regime protesters, attacking the massive anti-regime demonstrations as they got too close to the royal palace. The lesson that these crackdowns only spark more anger appears to be lost on officials
Pentagon officials insisted Gates’ visit was primarily to reassure King Hamad that the US is “committed” to their military presence in the nation (the island is home to America’s 5th fleet), and the calls for reform appear very secondary.
The calls for reforms may well have been embraced early on, when the protest movement was simply demanding improved conditions and more freedom. Since the violent crackdowns by the regime, however, the calls have increasingly been for a full ouster of the monarchy and its replacement with a democracy, something the US appears extremely averse to.
And the crackdowns are continuing today, as reports have police forces, backing with pro-regime protesters, attacking the massive anti-regime demonstrations as they got too close to the royal palace. The lesson that these crackdowns only spark more anger appears to be lost on officials
Troops Killed Doctor Earlier This Week in Salah al-Din
Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi today called for a formal inquiry by the Security and Defense Committee to investigate several recent attacks by US “non-combat” troops in northern Iraq.
The attacks, according to Nujaifi, violate the Status of Forces Agreement prohibition against such operations going on without coordination by both provincial and national officials.
One attack earlier in this week came in the Salah al-Din Province, when an “air drop” operation led to an attack on a doctor in a small village and later to the arrest of his brother as a “suspect.” The incident was largely shrugged off by the US but caused quite a stir in Iraq’s parliament.
Parliament’s Health Committee already condemned the killing, and had likewise urged an investigation into the attack. The Security and Defense Committee, however, would be in a much better position to probe it.
The attacks, according to Nujaifi, violate the Status of Forces Agreement prohibition against such operations going on without coordination by both provincial and national officials.
One attack earlier in this week came in the Salah al-Din Province, when an “air drop” operation led to an attack on a doctor in a small village and later to the arrest of his brother as a “suspect.” The incident was largely shrugged off by the US but caused quite a stir in Iraq’s parliament.
Parliament’s Health Committee already condemned the killing, and had likewise urged an investigation into the attack. The Security and Defense Committee, however, would be in a much better position to probe it.
Regime Forces Crack Down on Protesters Near Royal Palace
Fresh off a visit to Brussels, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived in Bahrain today for private talks with King Hamad, where he reportedly urged some unspecified reforms and talks with the massive protest movement demanding his ouster.
Pentagon officials insisted Gates’ visit was primarily to reassure King Hamad that the US is “committed” to their military presence in the nation (the island is home to America’s 5th fleet), and the calls for reform appear very secondary.
The calls for reforms may well have been embraced early on, when the protest movement was simply demanding improved conditions and more freedom. Since the violent crackdowns by the regime, however, the calls have increasingly been for a full ouster of the monarchy and its replacement with a democracy, something the US appears extremely averse to.
And the crackdowns are continuing today, as reports have police forces, backing with pro-regime protesters, attacking the massive anti-regime demonstrations as they got too close to the royal palace. The lesson that these crackdowns only spark more anger appears to be lost on officials
Pentagon officials insisted Gates’ visit was primarily to reassure King Hamad that the US is “committed” to their military presence in the nation (the island is home to America’s 5th fleet), and the calls for reform appear very secondary.
The calls for reforms may well have been embraced early on, when the protest movement was simply demanding improved conditions and more freedom. Since the violent crackdowns by the regime, however, the calls have increasingly been for a full ouster of the monarchy and its replacement with a democracy, something the US appears extremely averse to.
And the crackdowns are continuing today, as reports have police forces, backing with pro-regime protesters, attacking the massive anti-regime demonstrations as they got too close to the royal palace. The lesson that these crackdowns only spark more anger appears to be lost on officials
More NATO Ships to Deploy Near Libya
Western officials continue to emphasize an “all options on the table” military attitude toward the Gadhafi regime in Libya, though it seems there is still enough resistance to the immediate attack called for by some top officials to keep it from actually happening.
Still, the moves continue to be in that direction, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted today that NATO has agreed to move some of its Mediterranean ships closer to the coast of Libya. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that NATO wouldn’t move further without a “clear legal basis.”
The European Union is also having a “crisis summit” to discuss Libya, and they likewise insist that “all options” are being considered, though the hawkish calls from French and British officials seem to be facing an uphill battle against German and Italian officials averse to starting yet another war.
As the fighting continues in Libya, officials have been hyping the prospect of a “no-fly zone,” though the fact that air strikes have only been intermittent have left many analysts wondering whether this would have any noticeable effect
Still, the moves continue to be in that direction, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted today that NATO has agreed to move some of its Mediterranean ships closer to the coast of Libya. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that NATO wouldn’t move further without a “clear legal basis.”
The European Union is also having a “crisis summit” to discuss Libya, and they likewise insist that “all options” are being considered, though the hawkish calls from French and British officials seem to be facing an uphill battle against German and Italian officials averse to starting yet another war.
As the fighting continues in Libya, officials have been hyping the prospect of a “no-fly zone,” though the fact that air strikes have only been intermittent have left many analysts wondering whether this would have any noticeable effect
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