Education Odds and Ends

On this blog I have not written a lot about education.  My focus and the source of the title for the blog is the grim yard of security issues that I research for a living and for fun.  However, many life choices have brought me to a point where I have to think of education a lot more.  I work at Nazarbayev University - a western-style university established 6 years ago in Astana, Kazakhstan.  I began working here after one year of being Dr. Willardson and after a very enjoyable, but very temporary experience as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UNLV.

The university is growing. Most of my colleagues are young, early-career academics.  However, the fact that I was only 1 year post-PhD did not reflect the fact that I had a bit of life experience under my belt. My administrative abilities and my willingness to do a bit of extra work resulted in my appointment as the acting chair of the department of political science and international relations.

It all started my first fall when I showed up and we were scheduling classes for spring. The process was quite chaotic.  The stated degree requirements that we had given to students were impossible to meet with the number and composition of our faculty.  Especially since we began an MA program along with our BA program the same year I started.  I spent the year working to update our program requirements to make them match what we could do while maintaining a program that was similar to programs in the US.  Along the way, I was elected to the Faculty Senate and was assigned to work on the University Quality Control committee.

Now much of my non-research time is spent trying to comply with increasingly intrusive demands from all sides about what our curriculum "must" do. Our university employs academics from all over the world and many of our administrators are British.  That model is very different from the one that I am familiar with, and much different than our school (which is partnered with University of Wisconsin, Madison) is modeled after.

This article (LINK) that showed up in my news reader feed struck a chord with me:

This story began in the 1990s, when reformers thought they could improve teaching and learning in college if they insisted that colleges declare their specific “learning goals,” with instructors defining “the knowledge, intellectual skills, competencies and attitudes that each student is expected to gain.” The reformers’ theory was that these faculty-enumerated learning objectives would serve as the hooks that would then be used by administrators to initiate reviews of actual student work, the key to improving teaching. 

That was the idea. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Not even close. Here is one example of how the mindless implementation of this idea distracts rather than contributes to the goal of improved student learning. When a team from the western accreditor, the WASC Senior College and University Commission, visited San Diego State University in 2005, it raised concerns that the school had shut down its review process of college majors, which was supposed to involve outside experts and the review of student work. Now, 10 years have passed and the most recent review by WASC (the team visit is scheduled for this month) finds there are still major gaps, with “much work to be done to ensure that all programs are fully participating in the assessment process.”

We are in the process of making our "LOs".  In some ways it is useful.  We are codifying expectations and standards that we can use to hold each other (as faculty) accountable.  However, each new round of reforms calls for increasing reports and monitoring and standardization of courses to the point that professors are viewed by many as simply "content delivery" devices.  The paradox of red tape and the need for administrators to quantify and monitor things that are out of their control and out of their competence is one that is at the heart of the modern university. It is often quite depressing.

Ammunition

A study on the negative effect of electronic devices in the classroom offers me some ammunition in my personal quest to kill Whatsapp, instagram, and all the other media use that distracts students.  (LINK)

A round up of arms-related goodness

This is a post for me to take care of some bookkeeping tasks.  There have been a number of articles written about arms sales that relate to my research interests lately.  However, I have needed to put them aside to finish up some other projects and to finish up the end of the year.  I will present this as a roundup list with a little commentary so I can come back and do some deeper work with these sources later.

Vietnam

The Vietnam War ended long ago.  The US has now lifted its arms prohibition on the country.  It was done via an executive order and announced by President Obama.  This is an interesting story for me.  In this case, the prohibition on sales was political - trumping economic concerns.  This decision is also political - a signal to China about the US interests in security in the region. It looks like the US will start fielding requests for aircraft. (LINK)

Russia has been supplying arms to Vietnam for a long time.  I wrote a vignette about naval sales to Vietnam for a paper I wrote in 2012 (unpublished).  Here is an interesting piece on the mechanics who maintain Russian-made Sukhoi jets for Vietnam (LINK).  This aspect of arms sales and military effectiveness has not really made its way into the literature on arms sales.  I think that it is really fascinating. If arms are something more than symbolic, they need to be maintained. The capacity for states to maintain their own high-end equipment puts them ahead of states that need to rely solely on the manufacturing country.  I am still thinking of how this could be incorporated into a research paper, so for now it remains an interesting small question.

Russia

Russia and arms are always interesting.  An interesting article from RFE/RL outlines the proliferation of new and fancy weapons being built by Russia and the fear that they will lead to a new arms race.

In other interesting news, Russia and the US (along with the rest of the P5) agreed to re-arm the Libyan government for that government to fight internal rebels (LINK).  This is a very interesting state of affairs.  The norm for western governments has been to avoid providing weapons to states to deal with internal repression (at least in policy and rhetoric). Now states are agreeing that states arming to fight against extremists is okay.  This in many ways validates the Russian position in Syria. States have a right to protect their regime from violence. Does this signal a shift in norms to take into account the growing threat of Islamic violence (i.e. ISIS), or is this a unique case?

F-35

The Pentagon admitted that the F-35 will be delayed and will not be ready for full production until (at least) 2018 (LINK).  The delays in this program are an interesting issue in arms acquisition and production.  The F-35 was supposed to be cheaper and better and it is morphing into a hybrid that is neither.  For me the interesting question to ask in a few years is whether the political capital gained by outsourcing and cooperating on its production are worth the cost in terms of acquisition cost and speed as well as the ratio of those two factors in effectiveness.

Zhirinovsky and the Power of Nationalism

RFE/RL has a good story today about the ways in which Russian governance is closer to the wack-a-doo ideas of Vladimrir Zhirinovsky than is comfortable.  I read the article with interest and reminisced about a paper that I wrote for a graduate seminar in comparative politics during my third year of graduate school in the Fall Semester of 2010.

The paper that I wrote was titled: Punching above Their Weight: Nationalist Parties in Presidential Systems.  The inspiration for the paper was the rise of the influence of Zhirinovsky in Russian politics.

I think that the idea of the paper was pretty good - although my execution of it was pretty limited.  Here is a piece from my theoretical set up from the paper:

Nationalist parties can occupy an important ideological space. Nationalist parties have their own policy preferences, and those preferences are communicated to the public. If the ideological space occupied by a nationalist party becomes a salient issue which a president must “own” in order to maintain office specifically and legitimacy more generally, then that party has “ideological blackmail potential.” This ideological blackmail potential will differ from polity to polity based on institutional and ideological factors.

The basic idea is that nationalist parties stake out key policy points that are sometimes incredibly salient.  In the case of Russia, the LDPR has occupied the space related to anger over the loss of great power status, the desire for international respect, and the idea that Russia has a special mission in the world.  Putin, because of domestic economic factors, has needed to use some of these themes to maintain support.  That usage comes at a cost - and part of that is adopting some of the more radical language espoused by the LDPR.  It means giving Zhirinovsky more power than he would have based on actual support for his total platform.


Presidential Susceptibility to Ideological Blackmail

		Nationalist Ideology
		Nationalist	Cosmopolitan
Institutional Constraints on Presidential Power	Strong	Low/Med	Low
	Weak	High	Low

Watching Russia is never boring.

Review of "Soviet Leaders and Intelligence"

Raymond L. Garthoff

Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War

Georgetown University Press

2015

ISBN:978-1-62616-229-7

160 Pages

$26.95

Books on intelligence history often get bogged down in details.  Books on history, and especially on historical leaders, are often ignorant of the details of intelligence that could add depth to their analyses.  Soviet Leaders and Intelligence is a book that avoids both of these problems.  This slim volume eschews pages of details about intelligence minutia and instead focuses on the issue of leader assessment of the US within the context of intelligence collection and analysis. While it is a slim book, it has within it a great deal to offer to scholars of not only intelligence, but of Cold War History, foreign policy, and diplomacy.  It is also a book that will be of interest to general audiences who are interested in the Cold War, Soviet history, and US-Soviet relations.

Garthoff’s study of the way that Soviet leaders view intelligence is situated squarely within the context of the Cold War.  Garthoff does this in two ways. First he outlines the geopolitical causes of the Cold War between the two states.  Second, he outlines the way that ideology on the part of the Soviet leaders both exacerbated tensions and shaded their perceptions of the United States, its intentions, and its actions.  This primary context of the book is the thread that ties together each of the chapter vignettes.  The book itself is arranged so that each Soviet leader – from Stalin through Gorbachev has his own chapter (with the exception of Andropov and Chernenko, whose short tenures were such that they are simply appended to Brezhnev and Gorbachev respectively).

One of the key insights of this book is the individual insights into the worldview of each of the Soviet leaders. Stalin, for instance, relied on personal relationships and his own analysis of the world, eschewing the analysis of intelligence and diplomatic personnel.  In the case of Stalin, his own isolation led to misconceptions and a belligerence toward the west, western media, and western leaders (Garthoff 2015, 3). Like Stalin, Khrushchev’s view of the United States was not affected by the intelligence provided to him (Garthoff 2015, 25), but he was also able to learn from early mistakes and bluffs against Kennedy.  Khrushchev was affected by his own experiences visiting America and his meetings with two presidents.  He credited President Kennedy for bringing more caution to the tone which the United States used in describing the Soviet Union (Garthoff 2015, 34).

The lesson that comes across throughout the book, however, is just how little the leaders of the Soviet Union heeded intelligence estimates.  Garthoff (2015, 75) describes how Gorbachev’s own worldview evolved:

As had occurred with his predecessors, personal contact and communication with a literally personified ‘adversary’ brought about changed perceptions and new policies.

The shifting attitudes of Gorbachev are contrasted with the continued negative view of US actions by the KGB and GRU led to what Garthoff (2015, 84) characterizes as an “intelligence war” between the US and Soviet intelligence services.  This intelligence war did not affect Gorbachev, and in fact his “…early interest in intelligence reports quickly declined” (Garthoff 2015, 85).

The politicization of intelligence, and intelligence skewed by a heavy ideological bias diminished the utility of that intelligence to the state leaders.  In the case of Stalin, the bias came from the top, by the time that Gorbachev had taken power, it had moved to the intelligence services.  The end result was that intelligence lost its consumers, the intelligence services lost their taskings, was cut out of the feedback loop, and ultimately lost its relationships with the Central Committee and its staffs (Garthoff 2015, 87).

These descriptions of the troubled relationship between intelligence services and the leaders that they are meant to represent touch on issues that are relevant to scholars and policy-makers today. The possible lessons from these vignettes are manifold, but I focus on two central themes that are of particular import.  The first is on the importance of leaders and leadership perceptions.

A great deal of scholarship in foreign policy analysis is focused on the assessment of state leaders. This scholarship began in the intelligence analysis community and moved into more general scholarship later.  The work of Leites (1953) was the first to really delve into issues of leader perception.  Later work on the operational code has yielded interesting insights into the worldviews of state leaders (Walker, Schafer, and Young 1999; George 1969; Schafer and Walker 2006).  While Garthoff focuses on historical figures and accounts of their perceptions, other scholars have attempted to ascertain the operational code of current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin (Dyson 2001).

The tie between Putin’s own intelligence career and subsequent rise to the top of Russian politics is even more interesting when considered in tandem with the insights made by Garthoff. Yuri Andropov was also a career KGB officer.  His own use of intelligence and the coloring of his worldview based on his intelligence training was a key component of his views of the United States. Two important points are raised in connection to Andropov’s own intelligence services worldview. The first of these is in connection with the downing of KAL 007 in August 1983. After Reagan strongly condemned the Soviets, Andropov responded by describing the incident as a provocation organized by US intelligence services (Garthoff 2015, 66–67). He connected the US aggressive tactics as a conscientious attempt to provoke the Soviets into shooting down the civilian airliner. This tendency to view the world in terms of information and misinformation, of plots, purpose, and of propaganda makes cooperation very difficult.

The second point that is raised concerning the tenure of Andropov is the increased cooperation between security services during his tenure.  The “Gavrilov channel” was opened to create a telephone hotline to arrange meetings between the intelligence services of both states during periods of tension.  The channel allowed both sides, during a period of intense hostility, to meet secretly “without political posturing” to seek clarifications and dispel misperceptions (Garthoff 2015, 70).

Doctored Intelligence and ISIS, is this a Crisis?

Why don’t political scientists study intelligence as part of other issues? That is a longer post for a different day and the subject of a paper that I currently have under review at a journal. For today, though, I am interested in the potential for politicization of intelligence processes.

This is in the news again.  A few months ago a news story caught my eye about the fact that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were being asked to change their assessments about ISIS (A good recap of the controversy is here).  The story is in the news again after the Paris attacks and the new conflagration that is occurring in Syria presently.

Analysts assert that they were asked to tone down assessments that the Islamic State was growing in strength despite the coalition actions against them.

Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts -- a metric not used since the Vietnam War -- to paint a more positive picture. 

Critics say this "activity-based approach" to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.

President Obama has responded to the allegations and said that he doesn't think that the White House has been kept in the dark about the nature of ISIS, and that the administration didn't want intelligence "shaded by politics."

Whether or not President Obama was directly involved in ordering intelligence to be "softened politically" is not the question.  The question is how any president can expect to get unvarnished intelligence when the incentives are built into the system to give information to the boss that things are going well.

In a recent book, Garthoff (2015)[1] explores the relationship between Soviet Leaders and Intelligence.  One of the key points of his book is that Soviet leaders relied on their own conceptions of the main adversary (the US) in evaluating intelligence.  Even if a system exists to funnel "pure intelligence" to a leader, his or her particular lens on the world will always affect the interpretation, and subsequent decisions based on that intelligence.  One of the fundamental questions about foreign policy is whether or not states behave as rational actors.  This depends on whether or not individuals act rationally. Theories of satisficing, of using heuristics to make decisions rather than carefully exploring all options helps us to understand behavior quite well.  If we truly want to understand how intelligence works, we need to understand not only the processes by which it is produced, but the processes by which it is consumed.

In the case of the CENTCOM reports, if the President was given access to the raw intelligence, it is unlikely that the doctored reports made that much difference in national-level decision making.  However, having reports that show success may change the calculus at the operational level, leading to poor strategic outcomes.

One of the other lessons from Garthoff was that Soviet leaders could not rely on intelligence assessment from the KGB and GRU precisely because those organizations were expressly ideological and their assessments were not objective enough to provide clear guidance for decision-making. If the US Intelligence Community (IC) becomes similarly politicized it will lead to marginalization of that government function.

From a bureaucratic survival perspective, then, it is is probably in the best interest of the IC to be (or at least appear to be) politically neutral and ideology free.  The short-term gains in political favor will lead to long-term decline in the political power of the institution.

__________
[1] Garthoff, Raymond. 2015. Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. Georgetown University Press.

MH17 And Ukraine - Obfuscation and Domestic Audiences

One theory that about Russia's involvement in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine is that its involvement got heavier after the downing of Malaysian flight 17 by the rebels.  Russia's increased involvement was not due to wanting more territory, but out of fear of what the rebels that they had released and enabled would do to Russia's reputation if left unchecked.  After the bloodless coup and takeover of Crimea, the events in Eastern Ukraine got very bad very quickly.  The downing of the flight was a PR nightmare.

The Dutch issued a report on the event this week that identifies the missile that took down the plane as a BUK missile.  The report is thorough and took a year to compile because of the many technical difficulties in obtaining the plane, and analyzing the data.  RFE/RL has some great articles on how this report has been obfuscated, ignored, and fought by the Russian propaganda machine at every turn.

A great aspect of the reporting is the step-by-step account of how the Dutch investigators rebuffed Russian efforts to soften language (LINK):

Appendices published (here and here) with the Dutch Safety Board’s report show that Russia attempted to convince investigators to invoke "other scenarios," such as the possibility that Flight MH17 was struck by an air-to-air missile. 

Critics have accused Moscow of floating the air-to-air-missile and other theories in order to deflect attention from substantial evidence indicating the Boeing 777 was downed by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile system known as a Buk, fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. 

But the documents released with the report show that, behind the scenes, the Dutch Safety Board also rejected alternative scenarios proposed by Russia as essentially baseless before concluding that a Buk missile exploded next to the Boeing 777 and sent it crashing to the ground, killing all 298 people on board. 

With arcane discussions of physics, telemetry, and military technology, the conclusions of the 15-month investigation largely match up with theories put forth by Ukraine, the United States, and other nations.

Read the full article with the full outline of the charges and counter-charges.

Another interesting development is that the Buk manufacturer immediately put out their own report denying the Dutch version (LINK):

The Russian company that manufactures the Buk ground-to-air missile system plans to issue a report on the July 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine on October 13, the same day the Dutch Safety Board plans to issue the results of its investigation into the incident. 

Almaz-Antei said in a press release on October 8 that it had carried out the detonation of a Buk missile under a decommissioned Boeing passenger jet in a "life-scale, real-time" experiment as part of its investigation into the disaster. 

The company said that preliminary results from the experiment support the conclusions that the firm presented in June -- namely, that the plane was shot down by a Buk missile fired from territory controlled by the Ukrainian military. 

This has now become a he-said, she-said battle over telemetry and math.  The upshot is that with the competing claims, Russia can still deny its involvement in the incident, even if other evidence points to that very involvement (LINK LINK).

If Moscow is really hoping only to keep its own citizens convinced that it is not operating in Ukraine - it seems to be working.  Follow this link to see responses to the BUK report by Muscovites.

Russia and Ukraine Links - Tanks and Missile Launchers Edition

A few weeks ago I put up some links about Russia and Ukraine (LINK).  I am adding to that collection again today. 

Russian tanks in the crisis (LINK).  It is getting harder and harder for Russia to deny that it is materially supporting the rebels in the breakaway region.  The article is a fascinating study in the use of open sources and social media to gather intelligence.  While this intelligence can be shared easily, since it doesn't involve disclosing classified sources or methods, the danger is that it feeds into the narrative of the Kremlin about US misinformation and propaganda regarding its role. Winning the propaganda game is very difficult for the defensive side. Not only are Russian tanks being used, but the training and showmanship associated with Russia.  Russia has been running tank olympics for the past few years, and the rebels did the same thing with their tanks a few weeks ago (LINK).



The same group that is finding evidence of Russian tanks and soldiers in Ukraine is releasing evidence of Russia's BUK missiles being used to shoot down the Malaysian Airlines jet in July 2014. (LINK).

Bellingcat, which analyzes information available on the Internet, said on October 8 that the Buk antiaircraft system involved in the incident can be traced from the Russian city of Kursk in June 2014 to a field outside the Ukrainian town of Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast on the day of the flight MH17 disaster. 

The next day, the launcher from the same Buk system -- with only three missiles instead of the normal compliment of four -- was documented to be near the Russian border in Luhansk Oblast, the report says. 

"We have looked at all the open-source investigation we've done over the last 18 months and it seems a pretty firm conclusion that the Russian military provided the missile launcher that shot down MH17, that the missile was launched from outside of Snizhne," Bellingcat founder and director Eliot Higgins says. "And we were able to track the Buk missile launcher back to the actual unit who provided it, the 53rd Brigade." 

Higgins added that Bellingcat has forwarded information about the individual members of the 53rd Brigade who might have been involved in shooting down MH17 to authorities investigating the incident.

 Is it any wonder that Ukraine now views Moscow as the main aggressor in their new military doctrine (LINK)? I mentioned in an earlier post about Russia's involvement in Syria that Putin is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about the encirclement of Russia by NATO (LINKhttp://grimyard.blogspot.com/2015/10/russia-and-syria-arms-related-issues.html). He has only himself to blame.