Isegoria

Alanbrooke — Field Marshal Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke — is one of Britain’s great heroes, Dominic Cummings reminds us, though not nearly so famous as Nelson or Wellington:

Most involved in politics talk a lot about ‘strategy’ but know little or nothing about this crucial strategist of WW2. Other WW2 generals such as Montgomery are much more famous. Alanbrooke was promoted by Churchill to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in the dark days of November 1941 as the Nazis approached Moscow. His nickname was ‘Colonel Shrapnel’. His formidable character burst with energy yet he also held himself in incredible control — true leaders, he thought, had to preserve and project self-control (to a degree that would be regarded as ‘unhealthy’ now). He repeatedly deflated Churchill and others, sometimes snapping a pencil between his fingers as he said ‘I flatly disagree’. His relationship with Churchill was stormy. Alanbrooke deeply admired him but the responsibility fell on Alanbrooke, more than anybody, of dealing with Churchill’s flaws and the dangers they risked. In replacing Dill with Alanbrooke, Churchill wanted someone more vigorous to prosecute the war and he got it.

When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes — stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!

It’s greatly to Churchill’s credit that he appointed him and stuck with him despite extreme disagreements and passions exploding amid the incredible tension of world events and their vast stakes, but it’s also much to his discredit that his memoirs vastly underplayed Alanbrooke’s contributions to victory.

[…]

Alanbrooke was one of those extraordinary people thrown up by war to senior roles who then almost always disappear when the war ends and discussions at the top revert to the norm — avoiding hard questions. It’s as if normal governments can’t deal with such people unless the stakes are existential. General Groves was another such extraordinary character who ran the Manhattan Project and was pushed out of the Pentagon after 1945 for being ‘too difficult’.

[…]

While children and students are told they study history ‘to learn from the mistakes’, one of the most fascinating and striking things about our world is how little learning there is from the greatest of errors. You can read analyses of deterring Prussia/Germany in Whitehall that are practically identical and indistinguishable from 1866, 1870, pre-1914, and the 1930s. You can read history after history of war after war. Human nature and the dynamics of large organisations don’t change so the same problems recur from the start of written history, and nobody can find a way of creating institutions that surmount these problems for long. You may reshape the Prussian General Staff and then reshape the map of Europe but before you know it, you’ve gone from the Elder Moltke working with Bismarck in triumph to his nephew imploding in disaster. One minute Bill Gates; the next, Steve Ballmer. Everything has its time of growth and decay. This means that we stumble into disaster after disaster where the details change but the fundamental patterns don’t. Covid and Ukraine are just the latest examples.

On one hand, we can see abstract principles of high performance a) recur constantly in written history we can all read, b) are extremely simple and do not require high intelligence to understand, and c) when deployed are frequently shocking, even world-changing, as well as sometimes bringing power, wealth and fame to those who deploy them.

But on the other, these principles remain essentially unrecognised by roughly 100% of institutions of all kinds, private and public. Instead, roughly all normal large organisations actually optimise for the opposite principles and promote those who embody these anti-principles. If there is some occasional high performing blip (such as PARC or the Vaccine Taskforce), these normal organisations, and particularly the middle managers within them, will move swiftly to close them and push away those responsible as far and as fast as possible.

This reliable feature of our world has many effects. One of them is that government systems are essentially ‘programmed’ to be slow and inefficient in updating. All institutions optimise for certain things based on incentives and culture. Large established organisations almost always optimise for ‘protect established power networks’, not ‘update useful information even if it disrupts established power networks’. And this means that the old parties, old bureaucracies and old political media are necessarily constantly surprised by events far beyond what they need to be — beyond the inevitable surprises generated by the uncomputable complexity of the world. The most valuable information is and will be almost always at the edge. Elite self-deception was critical to the context of WW2 and looking over the centuries it seems only safe to assume it’s a permanent state of affairs, at least without revolutionary experimentation with institutions that optimise differently and will (we should assume) in their own ways be as, or even more, dangerous.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »