The Defense Information Pipeline

A couple months ago, I wrote up a critique of an EA organization's take on the risks of nuclear war, focusing mostly on their analysis of how much of America's and Russia's arsenals would survive a first strike by the other side. There were a lot of issues, most of which boiled down to the author not having a good grasp of the broader defense world, and thus not knowing what questions to ask.

This ship's pipeline distributes oil, not information, but illustrations are hard.

But I can't really blame the author for doing a bad job. How would someone whose background is in evaluating the cost-effectiveness of various charitable interventions know to ask how much time an SSBN spends deployed? More broadly, there's a major gap in public communications about the defense world. There's a lot of stuff talking about things like systems and capabilities, but there's very little, particularly online, that systematically equips people to think about it well. Books are somewhat better, but even there, there seems to be surprisingly little focus on deliberately bridging the information gap.¹ But in general, the people who are interested for whatever reason just pick it up by reading a bunch of books, while the people who aren't continue to be confused by the articles they read, most of which are not written by people who have crossed the gap.

This seems starkly in contrast with most other fields I'm familiar with. For instance, I read several "basics of spaceflight" books in high school, all of which did a decent job of explaining things like elementary orbital mechanics and how rockets work. And there's plenty of that kind of material online for rocketry. The biggest reason is probably that "rocket science" is a much narrower and much clearer field than "defense", and if we look at narrow and clear subfields of defense, there is plenty of coverage. In particular, the quite clear subfields of history and equipment tend to have by far the best coverage, with most works focusing on a narrow slice of one subfield or the other.² I suspect that a lot of this is economic. The questions "what happened during battle X?" or "what is thing Y like?" are generally fairly easy to answer as an author³ and easy for the audience to understand when they're considering buying your book. So the book on battle X or ship Y is easier to write than the book on the deeper aspects of logistics and defense procurement, and it will probably sell better, too.

But why would potential authors have to go their own way in explaining the underlying fundamentals of the defense world? Shouldn't the military have spent decades figuring out how to explain this to new recruits? Can't we just hand out basic military manuals or maybe a ROTC textbook?

In response to this, I will point you to TRADOC PAM 600-4, the handbook the Army gives to new soldiers at the start of basic training.⁴ It contains only the information that matters to someone who has just joined the Army, and the Army basically cares that they know how to march, who to salute, what to wear and how not to get hurt. The military trains people to do their current job, no more and no less. A new soldier doesn't need to know that the Navy exists, and the only mention of that service in the document is about where to go if you're in trouble.⁵ Nor is this limited to enlisted men. Yes, officers do receive slightly broader training, but it's still very focused on their job, which is usually a combination of junior manager over a bunch of 19-year-olds and some technical task like building roads or not hitting things with a ship. Very few people in the military actually need to have a broad-based understanding of the defense world, something very apparent when reading veterans writing about defense topics outside their area of experience.

But why can't we look at how those few are taught, and use their textbooks? The problem there is that the war colleges, which is where this training takes place, are built around teaching people who have been in the defense field for a decade or more. These people are generally mid-grade officers, and far from a random sample of even that population, which puts them at a great remove from the general public. They're going to have a lot of the background that the general public doesn't, and they're going to have spent enough time around the Pentagon that their thoughts have five sides. Handing someone off the street a book of five-sided thought will be both painful and not particularly informative.

This, I think, is where the defense world varies most sharply from most fields. Most subjects have a massive edifice of people who have spent decades or centuries figuring out how to teach a bunch of 18-year-olds who previously knew nothing about their field. I strongly suspect that the methods and framework they develop are vital for broader public engagement with these subjects. Yes, Kerbal Space Program has exposed an order of magnitude more people to rocket science than college classes do, but it probably would never have existed without readable textbooks of rocket science for the devs to work from.⁶

But that then raises the question of why military studies lack the academic support that sustains most fields. An obvious explanation is anti-military bias in academia, but there wasn't much academic engagement with contemporary military studies (as opposed to military history) even in the decades before that trend solidified. Some of this may be because during much of the 19th century, the line between military history and current military practice was less sharply drawn than it is today. But I think some of it is down to the structure of the field, as discussed above. The military generally trains its own, so there was no particular reason for colleges to study military affairs as job training. There are some narrow exceptions to this, mostly in the elite government and policy schools, but those serve a pretty narrow audience that will need five-sided thoughts and is concerned a lot more with grand strategy than how to keep an infantry battalion fed. There's also a stream of autodidacts in the field, who probably bridge some of the gap. All this means no demand for classes, which obviously turns universities off from the field.

The funding structure around defense undoubtedly contributes to all of this. Fundamentally, there's a lot of money in the field, which means that there are more jobs than there are enthusiasts, and the jobs generally pay pretty well. This is in stark contrast to fields like politics and sports, where there are a lot more people who want seats than there are places at the table, with the overflow jostling to get the seats in the observer's boxes of journalism and academia. Even the tiny number who really want to do defense journalism are likely to end up at specialist outlets like Jane's and AvLeak that provide information to the industry, not the mass media, because those are the outlets which really care about having good reporters. Mass media is generally left to people who are specialists in journalism instead of military matters, with predictable results.

But does any of this really matter? After all, the professionals seem to know what they need to, and isn't that what matters? Unfortunately, the problem is that the ultimate bosses in the US (and the West more broadly) are amateurs in the form of voters and their representatives.⁷ And this in turn leads to bad decision-making, whether it be buying stupid and pointless ships or unfairly criticizing programs that are working through their problems.

I don't really have any answers to this problem. I've done what I can here to fight this kind of ignorance, but it's on a case-by-case basis, and I'm not in a position to really attack the problem on a deeper level. Two decades of marinating in the field has left me pretty familiar with these problems, but not well-equipped to explain them simply to outsiders. Maybe someday I'll have more insights and can publish them somewhere more prominent, but that's probably a long ways off.