On Revelation

The problem with blogging is deciding how much of yourself to reveal. Maybe I'll leave it as a koan for the time being. I can always be drawn out later.

Returning

Shelley is sick with the flu. I feel it creeping up on me, too. But I gave series of talks on writing in college to her classes at GC on Friday, and I felt fantastic at the end of the day because I had felt moments of excellence when I was speaking. I wish I could write as well as I speak. I can. But for some reason I can't get my dissertation to read like I speak. Maybe it's the genre. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's the preturnaturally good weather. Maybe I don't want to talk her about my dissertation anymore.

I don't. I want to write, not analyze with words.

To work, or write...'tis the question

So I decided to apply for a adjunct teaching post at William & Mary teaching intro to IR for the Spring. I would fun, I'd learn a lot, but it might keep me from doing dissertation work. Or it might induce such work. I don't know. And that's always the problem, isn't it. One needs to work, but one also needs to write and balancing the two before the latter becomes synonymous with the former is the great stumbling block for all would-be wordsmiths.


In other thoughts, it's rather lonely here. I do hope someone discovers this blog sometime.

BTW, for my massive audience out there, my website is finally up WWW.MATTSCHMIDTPHD.NET. It's everything you've ever wanted to know about political science. There ARE some great links to military studies and comparative studies sites. The site name, of course, is the kind of aspirational promise that I hope will keep me on track to finish, if for no other reason than because it's an annoying process to change domain names.

First Draft of Proposal Opening

This is the first draft of my proposal opening. Comments and critiques welcome.
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“Well alright. Let’s build an army!”
-Capt. Andrew Kressin, USMC,
upon being assigned to a unit training the new Iraqi army in 2004

“War is not the content, the end, or the sole means of politics, but a condition whose actual possibility politics presupposes.”
-Carl Schmitt



Arriving in Iraq in January 2004, U.S. Marine Captain Andrew Kressin expected to spend his tour performing the perfunctory duties of a General’s aide. Instead, after milling around the Green Zone for a week he was assigned to a unit then called the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team, the CMATT, in milspeak. CMATT officials, in Capt. Kressin’s words, told him their mission was simply “to start an army,” prompting Kressin’s bemused gung-ho reply, “Well alright. Let’s start an army!”
Of course, building an army, to say nothing of a full-fledged military, is not a simple task. Rome, and the army that turned it into a state, as it were, took more than a weekend to build. Nor is it clear that an army, once built, is capable of doing what it is Capt. Kressin’s masters in Washington hoped it would: form the nucleus of a stable democratic government. Yet the success of U.S. policy in Iraq seems to largely depend on the ability of soldiers like Kressin to build that army. Both the short-term U.S. exit strategy in Iraq, and the long-term policy of democratization for the entire region hinge on the military creation project. Militaries beget states, the theory goes; and the right kind of military might even beget a democratic regime.
President Bush laid out the logic of this strategy most explicitly in a 2005 address at Ft. Bragg:

. . . the best way to complete the mission is to help Iraqis build a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.
So our strategy going forward has both a military track and a political track. The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists, and that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

In simplest terms this project asks if the administration’s logic, that “as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” is true. Or rather, it asks the question that comes before: can a military training program stand up a foreign military, much less a stable, democratic government? In other words, the underlying logic of the President’s argument rests on an assumption about the relationship between a state’s military development and its political development. This project seeks to open up that assumption by starting by asking why it is the U.S. began to undertake such large-scale foreign military training programs in the first place. What can the history of past programs tell us about the likelihood of success of the current programs in place in Iraq, Georgia, the Philippines and elsewhere?
The project is an attempt to tell the story of how and why, over the last century-plus, American nation-building efforts came to pivot around the success or failure of military training programs. Among the questions which are central to the project are:

What is the relationship between the formation of a military and the formation of a stable state? Of a democratic state?

When did the U.S. first employ a large-scale foreign military training program? What did it look like? How was it structured?

Why did it do so? How did the training program fit into the full picture of U.S. war aims and/or strategic policy?

What is the pattern of U.S. foreign military training programs over time?

How extensive were such programs the past? How extensive are they today?

Were past training programs successful in terms of the short-term and long-term goals justifying their employment? Why or why not?

Given the history of past programs, what is the likelihood of success for contemporary programs?

Why have the military and academic communities seemingly ignored the importance of these programs?

Outline of Chapters
Obviously, the single largest example of such a training program is the ongoing one in Iraq. Though it is largely too soon, and as yet, too dangerous (a telling fact in itself) to tell much of the specific story behind the ordeals of Capt. Kressin, President Bush or others involved in the Iraqi operations, the Iraq case nonetheless forms a kind of shadow case throughout the project. The structure envision for the project is to begin by looking again at the literature on state formation theory in order to reassess the linkage between military development and state development, as it stands at present. The second stage involves reconstructing the first of the major U.S. foreign military training programs in the Philippines during the Spanish American War. The thrust of this part of the study is to use the Philippines example as a way to establish the historical context of subsequent programs and as a means of examining the pattern of outcomes, the relative success or failure of such programs in support of both short and long-term U.S. policies in the war. The third chapter will take up the Vietnam case as an example where the foreign military training program precipitated both the escalation of U.S. involvement in the war and covered its exit. Chapter four shifts the focus from the historical to the contemporary by looking at the most accessible major U.S. training program, the Georgian Sustainment and Stability Operations Program based in Krstsanisi, Georgia in the former Soviet Union. Finally, the project envisions an epilogue that explores the lessons taken from the previous chapters as they might be applied to the training program in Iraq. But the starting point to it all necessisarily begins with the question of state formation as a product of military development.

Feeling like an adult, being a grad student

Perhaps it means I'm grown up when I get nervous reading in the morning paper that there's a link between older dads and autism. But then I think to myself, "Hey, I'm in my PJs and could stay in them all day today, a Tuesday, if I wanted to," and suddenly I don't feel grown up anymore. I want to be to grown up, but sometimes it seems like modernity won't let me. It's as if we can't grow up until we're 50 anymore because the world doesn't want to make space for us. Our parents were all grown up by the time they were our age, and we're just starting.

The IDEA behind this site - human flourishing and the graduate experience

The idea is to provide a road map for myself, and future, social science dissertation writers in order to help each of us finish our dissertations quicker than we otherwise might by providing a forum for discussion about the issues facing us as we finish our programs. My fondest wish, however, is that this site also grows into a forum that can be used by enlightened graduate departments to change the way graduate education is delivered in the U.S.

In my own experience the biggest problem with graduate education is the engendering of a hyper-competitive atmosphere among students and faculty in the same department. While some competition is necessary, the model of graduate education as a battle of sorts is extremely corrosive of real learning. To borrow from Aristotle, the imposition of a hyper-competitive environment in graduate education, and indeed across too much of academe, is counterproductive of the human flourishing (eudiamonia) which ought to be the aim of education. Much more needs to be done to encourage collaboration on works of real merit instead of perpetuating the myth of the lone scholar-genius. Perhaps especially in the social sciences this myth is corossive of true scholarship because it tends to produce the "scholarship" of the snipe, where one lone "genius" snipes at the work of another in a perpetual game of misreading the each other's work in order to build strawman arguments to dispose of.

But more later. What is needed now are examples of this kind of "scholarship". Any takers?

Me, at the entrance to a cave dwelling, in Gori, Georgia.

A picture of me at the entrance to a cave monastary in Gori. Gori is, incidentally, also the birthplace of Joseph (Dzughashvili) Stalin.