June 26, 2003
From the jacket:
How does the U.S. Post Office plan to deliver mail after atomic Armageddon? How do oil industry executives intend to collect 10 million gallons of oil spilled in the Gulf of Alaska? How do regulators try to convince people that everyone can be evacuated from congested Long Island after a nuclear power plant destroys itself? Lee Clarke enters the world of managers and experts to find out how governments and corporations plan for massive disaster when they have no clue as to how to go about it. He argues that managers create plans that are "fantasy documents," rhetorical tools that are used to convince audiences that experts are in charge and that all is well.
As symbols of control, order, and stability, fantasy documents make danger seem normal. They can also increase risk-rather than reduce it as plans are supposed to do because managers and employees come to think that the fantasy documents represent real capabilities. Fantasy documents are disturbing persuasions because they permit people to think they can control the uncontrollable.
We are increasingly skeptical of big organizations, yet we have no choice but to depend on them for protection from big dangers. We expect managers and specialists to tell the truth, yet, as Clarke points out, reassuring judgments from experts may have no basis in fact or experience. Provocative and written for a general audience, Mission Improbable makes the case that society would be safer, smarter, and fairer if organizations would admit their limitations.
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In the biological warfare literature, there are lots of references to a series of bioterrorism exercises that were held in the U.S. starting around 1998. The triggering event was Commander in Chief Clinton reading Richard Preston's novel The Cobra Event. This alarmist fiction was written with the declared intention of scaring the pee (and a big wad of funding) out the federal government. It did.
The resulting allocation of resources and frenzy of planning was mostly an expensive charade and smokescreen for pork-barrel issues and shameless trough feeding. The "bioterrorism preparedness" was worse than useless when the anthrax attacks in September and October 2001 happened - the "preparations" focussed attention on the Capitol when the people at risk were in the post offices. Not all fantasy planning will lead to failure, but unrealistic planning can delay the response time. But that is not real problem with fantasy planning.
Lee Clarke explains that spinning out fantasies about disaster is the norm. The real purpose of most disaster planning is to stake out bureaucratic turf, delineate power boundaries, define chains of command (essentially who "coordinates" and who gets "coordinated") and lastly, if ever, about dealing with disasters.
Responding to disaster is a hit or miss proposition. There have been disasters where communities pulled through successfully by sheer gut instinct, having no plan at all. There have been other instances where highly detailed plans and carefully coordinated institutions have collapsed completely in circumstances that were forseen and prepared for. And careful planning has sometimes succeeded.
What Clarke found from his study of disasters is that planning and the success of disaster response are, at best, "loosely coupled." There is no magic formula for dealing with unexpected situations which initially overwhelm attempts to control them. The standard mantra of coordination, communication and cooperation is repeated in every disaster plan, but there seems to be very little relationship between planning and results -- a phenomenon Clarke calls "loose coupling."
One of the things about catastrophic events is difficulty of perceiving what are causes and what are effects. When things are going to hell in a handbasket, everything is an effect.
Clarke's discovery -- and it is a crucial one -- is that much of the process of disaster planning is a political one (in the sense that politics is all about resolving conflicts about the allocation of power and resources) and the results are mostly symbolic. Planning for disaster response says more about the planners than it does about disasters.
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One concept that recurs throughout Clarke's book is the notion of "controlling the uncontrollable." Closely aligned with the idea of uncontrollable events is the notion of "singularities" -- events that differ in scale to a degree that they are qualitatively distinct. In physics, one type of singularity is the black hole, a region of space where the density of mass is so great that the fabric of space collapses in upon itself. At the "event horizon" of a singularity, the rules no longer apply.
Clarke spends a great deal of time exploring the ramifications of the greatest disaster singularity facing us: total thermonuclear warfare. He points out the steady drumbeat of 50 years of "preparedness" for fighting and winning (which really means a tiny remnant surviving) thermonuclear war. Particularly stunning are the lopsided equations of the war planners and the defense planners. The war planners are dedicated to the notion that our side of a thermonuclear war will completely obliterate a minimum of 70% of the national infrastructure necessary for an opponent's recovery. The defense planners make great celebration over the wonderful possibilities of reconstruction and survival with less than 30% of the national infrastructure necessary for recovery.
But more importantly, nuclear defense planning is anchored on the prediction that civil defense will save 80% of the population. (It turns out that the 80% number was just made up out of thin air, but once it became dogma -- the wish becomes reality -- it could never be revised downwards without admitting earlier planning was completely wrong.) So the warfighters can destroy over 70% of the target and simutaneously, the defenders can save 80% of the target. This is the bottom line of fighting and winning a thermonuclear war.
Since the inescapable conclusion is that fighting and winning a thermonuclear war is nothing more than a suicide mission, the defense planners have had to sugar-coat armageddeon. The long-term policy outcome was to rely on "apparent affinities" that ignored scaling effects of disasters.
So a nuclear war is just like the large-scale disasters (earthquakes, storms, forest fires, train wrecks, airplane crashes, oil spills, pipeline explosions, industrial accidents, etc.) that we cope with and (mostly) survive on an irregular basis -- but just a teeny bit bigger in scale. This evolving policy of "dual-hazards" planning by the late 1970's became the gospel of federal, state and local emergency management planning.
(Note the unexamined assumption in emergency management: we can manage anything. We used to call it "Civil Defense" but nobody bought that idea for a minute. But "Emergency Management," that's something everybody can get behind! Never mind that the two phrases describe exactly the same thing...)
Dual-hazards planning assumes that there are no changes in the quality of events when the scale of the events changes. In other words, a 60-megaton hydrogen bomb is exactly like a firecracker -- only bigger. Hydrogen bombs and firecrackers share an apparent affinity. We can deal with accidents involving firecrackers with band-aids, so cleaning up after a messy event like the near-simultaneous explosion of thousands of hydrogen bombs just needs more band-aids. We can do the arithmetic; so many firecrackers equals a hydrogen bomb, one firecracker needs this many band-aids, do the multiplication and we've won a nuclear war...
This "one really large size fits all" disaster planning inevitably heads off into the realms of fanstasy very quickly. And the real effect isn't to make us more ready and able to survive total obliteration, but to sell the notion that the people planning on killing everyone (and drawing large salaries up to the moment they succeed) really know what they are doing and we should not only trust them, but surrender control of our lives and our fortunes to them. Because they are people who can "control the uncontrollable."
If we lived in a rational world, angry mobs would be hunting down and killing these omnicidal maniacs as a public health measure. But instead, we make them our leaders.
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One of the joys of Clarke's writing is his ability to produce clear and concise topic statements. Take this example from chapter 6, Organizations, Symbols, Publics:
Fantasy documents tend to arise when there is no meaningful history to draw on in fashioning an appropriate solution to a problem. The basic thing that fantasy documents symbolize is control - control of the untoward, control of danger, control of catastrophes. But before organizations, their experts, and the people at the top who try to direct organizations can claim they are able to control any kind of problem, they must first make the problem into something that can be solved. That is, they must transform uncertainties into risks. The uncertainty-to-risk transformation can be quite functional, in the sense that the calculations that effect the transformation are grounded in real knowledge of problems of the same type. But the transformation can also be strategic, the calculations not based so much in knowledge but in the claim to others that it is possible to control the uncontrollable. In such instances it may not be possible to make a real uncertainty-risk transformation but it nevertheless remains important that the calculations appear to do so. That's what apparent affinities do.
Clarke's clarity of style make him quotable.
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For our purposes here at World In Conflict, Mission Improbable carries another message. Clarke touches on the issue of war mostly in terms of thermonuclear war and defense planning, but the broader question of violent conflict as an intentional disaster bears looking into. What, after all, is the difference between chosing to fight a war that cannot be won and chosing to create an oil economy which makes massive spills certain?
The march to war is very much the same type of process, conducted by the same types of organizations, responding to the same types of pressures from their social environments. So the question becomes, is there a real (as opposed to an apparent) affinity between war and disaster planning? If the connection between these activities is not just an analogy and is instead the connection that exists between objects of the same category, then Clarke's book will tell us -- perhaps -- something about how nations go to war. So is war correctly categorized as disaster?
I think it is. The construction of disaster is an organizational task. Building a pipeline that can explode or a toxic waste dump that can leak differs in instrumentality from sending a nation into a war. But that difference is not really a distinction. What sets wars apart from earthquakes, oil spills, airplane crashes, industrial catastrophes and the rest is that war is intentional. The whole purpose of war is to wreak death and destruction. This difference is less of a distinction when one assumes that the bad consequences (oil spills, industrial accidents, building collapses, etc.) of risk-prone organizational activities differ from war only in that the probability of these accidental consequences is not perfectly certain. Even in war, the probability that effects will match intents is not perfectly certain. Ultimately, the decisions organizations make about risky and uncertain activities comes down to a utilitarian balancing of costs versus benefits.
If war has become just another sort of industrial activity -- identical in its key features with, say the process of siting a hazardous chemical facility in an urban center -- then Clarke's knowledge of disaster applies equally well to war.
Just to certain, the hypothesis should be stated in strong through weak forms:
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Strong form -- the organizational behaviors, knowledge structures, decisionmaking and relationships of war and other disasters are logically equivalent. The observations drawn from disaster planning are fully applicable to war planning.
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Mild form -- the organizational behaviors, knowledge structures, decisionmaking and relationships of war and other disasters are analogous. The observations drawn from disaster planning may shed light on war planning.
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Weak form -- the organizational behaviors, knowledge structures, decisionmaking and relationships of war and other disasters posses metaphorical similarities. The observations drawn from disaster planning may apply rhetorically to war planning.
The strong form is falsifiable. It can be tested and evaluated in a systematic manner. The mild form offers little guidance or utility. The weak form is purely rhetorical. I see no value in hedging -- the strong form is the only one with analytic value.
Assuming the strong hypothesis is true means that Clarke's analysis in Mission Improbable can be directly applied to the decisions surrounding our current disaster in Iraq. Let's see where it leads us.
The following statements are passages from Mission Improbable that have [war] phrases substituted for "disaster" phrases.
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Interventionists use [war] plans as forms of rhetoric, tools designed to convince audiences that they ought to believe what the [interventionists] say. In particular, some [war] plans have so little instrumental utility in them that they warrant the label "fantasy document." [Pg. 2]
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...[post-liberation reconstruction programs] rested on a logical contradiction that made them "either impossible or redundant." That is, for [post-liberation reconstruction] to work social order would have to already exist. Put differently, after the bombs fell there would probably be chaos and devastation, people would be stunned and possibly panicked; gauging the possibility of organized, directed, institutional behavior would itself be impossible. Yet [post-liberation reconstruction] measures (or at least massive, centralized ones),would need organized, directed, institutional behavior to work. Either the social order would not be destroyed, in which case [post-liberation reconstruction] was redundant, or social order could not get going again, in which case [post-liberation reconstruction] was impossible. [Pg. 40]
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To mount an effective case that it makes sense to talk about ["liberating" Iraq] and restoring to normalcy a society devastated by [invasion] demands that the singularity of [resistance war] be dispensed with. While it is not necessary to argue that an [Iraqi resistance] is some sort of everyday affair, it is necessary to argue that it is sufficiently like something that we know as to lend itself to operational rationality. The reason this is so is that if the event is singularly, ultimately, overwhelmingly [uncontrollable], then how could it be reliably known? To simply say, "I don't know," would be almost impossible for the [Bush administration]: their environments demanded it of them, and they demanded it of themselves. They would, capable or not, control the [invasion and occupation of Iraq] . [Pg. 93]
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The [intelligence] expertise must be manufactured. This process involves two major steps. First is the task of producing esoteric knowledge, or at least the appearance that there are things to be known that only a select few can rightly know. Second is the task of muting competing voices. When the legitimacy of expert status is hotly contested it is more difficult to draw boundaries around esoteric knowledge.
To produce the appearance of [intelligence] expertise is difficult but not impossible. We know that all real experts draw on some body of documents that contain their esoteric knowledge. But with fantasy documents there is no real research at hand for that purpose. In "research" on [Iraqi weapons of mass destruction] the main way of creating those documents was the self-referential report. There was a small handful of [neoconservative organizations and Iraqi opposition groups like the INC] that produced [intelligence] reports and extrapolations. Those reports and extrapolations were usually made with huge assumptions, the most prominent being that [Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons]. 'There were almost no data in any of them. They were, indeed, fanciful stories that the [operatives] told those who had the power to authorize ["regime change."] And the [intelligence] cited in any report was made up of [intelligence] produced by other, similar [operators]. None of the work, probably, could have passed any rigorous review by outsiders. It is from such documents that assumptions of [WMD stockpiles and Iraqi relations with terrorist networks] enter the documentary lore, later to become "facts" or "findings" from previous [intelligence]. They become the micro-fantasies in the larger fantasy documents. Such reports have served the purpose, however, of producing a body of knowledge, a pile of paper, to which subsequent experts can point in an appeal to [intelligence] expertise. [Pg. 129]
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But lies are of a different genre than most fantasy documents. With deliberate deception the deceivers command information sufficient to know they are lying. The basis of fantasy documents is not knowledge but lack of knowledge. To deceive deliberately requires a degree of cunning and a command of information that is not in evidence in the cases reviewed here. The logic of my argument, moreover, goes against the deception thesis: the organizations don't know enough to create effective [war] plans, so how could they know enough to lie and cover up?
Fantasy documents, however, usually are deceptive in their effects. This makes them even more dangerous than outright lies. All you need to rebut lies are knowledge and the wherewithal (e.g., money, opportunity, political clout) to argue with the deceiver. Fantasies are more elusive than that. They are harder to combat. And their production is more complex. Fantasy planning is more than ruse, more than a shell game in which the handler of the shells, a practiced trickster and deliberate deceiver, separates fools from their money. The deception theory holds that planners and organizational masters are fully rational, decidedly cunning, and completely in control of organizations. But leaders are rarely that competent.
To deceive deliberately is to try to convince others to accept a definition of reality that you do not yourself share. Fantasy documents are attempts to create a reality that all will share. [Pg. 141]
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The last transformed passage is particularly interesting. It is a very good explanation about the ongoing flap over the bogus intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Likewise, if the Iraqi resistance is a political/military disaster singularity (like the civil implosion of Lebanon or the war of national liberation in Vietnam) it will turn out that there is no workable policy other than to leave Iraq.
As an exercise in transformative grammar, one would have to conclude that at least the selected passages provide a reasonable and testable explanation for the road to war. Maybe war is less controllable and more poorly thought out than most people assume.
If the strong hypothesis about the isomorphism of disaster planning and war is correct, one inescapable conclusion is that the war with Iraq was more about political power in the United States than anything which might either exist or occur in the Middle East.
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