Celebrate My PA's 100th Post!

I just wrapped up COMM 5610 at the University of Utah. What a ride. I can't tell you too much about the class without violating OpSec (and student privacy), but I can render an overall verdict of...GUILTY! Or innocent. Whichever one means the class was great.

But what does that have to do with "a teacher's education in the Army?" you ask. You can't hold me to that title forever, I say. But in this case, it actually relates.

One of the themes of this blog has been teaching and learning, both in the civilian classroom and in Army training programs, particularly where the two overlap. But if you have read even three Teaching and Learning posts, you'll know that most of my stuff has to do with high school, not college learners. This is a whole new rodeo for me.

So I'm going to be giving it some good thought. But one that can't escape me is the need for clear objectives. When we're talking politics, war, or any subject offered at this fine university, it's imperative to be clear on objectives. What is the intended outcome? I'm sure my students will agree that I need to work on that part.

A few highlights:

• We had a  major general visit the class. There aren't many of those around, so we were pretty fortunate. 
• We also had a retired major and an active major teleconference in. I need to get other branches. 
• My students are writing about some really cool topics for their final papers, including network-centric war, SDI, drones, social media use during conflict, and the greening of the US Navy. More on those topics later. 

So this is the hardest post I have written. I feel a little like Tim Brown at his 99th touchdown reception. Waiting for the Hall of Game guaranteeing 100th must have been nerve racking. Now I know exactly how it feels to finally get there.

Remembering Casey Sheehan and all the other Volunteers who have Died

This is simply a repost from my Washington Times Communities column, but more than appropriate here:

Casey Sheehan RIP: Remembering a fallen soldier

Black Five is an excellent milblog that regularly has posts in honor of soldiers who have died in GWOT. Thanks for the reminder guys. 

Soldiers at McDonalds: Exporting Democracy

Two years ago I reminisced about Army chow. Let me take this opportunity to reminisce anew. I have often said that Army food is pretty darned good. That statement disregards MREs, of course. It now disregards most of what comes out of the chow hall at U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan in Seoul, Korea.

Luckily, we had alternatives in abundance.

It was wonderful to see the Golden Arches all over Seoul. So far as I can tell, there are 25 McDonalds in the greater Seoul area. We visited one, and I saw two others in my very short travels.

This blog reports that the chain hopes to have 500 restaurants in the ROK by 2015.

I am a loyal McDonalds diner here at home, and in my visit to Korean Mickey Dees, three things made me particularly happy.

1. As trite as it sounds, the taste of McDonalds is consistent and welcoming. Coming off a string of less-than-desirable meals featuring kimchi, cups of noodles, and a tubed meat paste that we were never able to identify, a good old Big Mac soothed the palate and the soul.

2. Seeing lots of Koreans stand in lines for burgers, fries and coke justified, to me at least, our 60-year alliance. If we can't get a McDonalds where we send our Soldiers, then what good is war? I joke, but only a little. McDonalds works pretty well. They are able to deliver a product to a lot of people who want it. Everyone involved in the arrangement seemed pretty happy about it. (I didn't asked the cattle).

While I'm not going to go so far as to say that McDonalds causes prosperity  I will say that I believe McDonalds-type chains to be an indicator of economic and social stability. Put it this way, they don't have any Mickey Dee's in North Korea.

3. Korean McDonalds are much more upscale than their American progenitors. I've seen the same thing in Germany and heard the same said about McDonalds the world over. It's not five-star, but respectable, and not patronized solely for convenience (the restaurant we went to in Seoul didn't even have a parking lot). Oh, and Korean McDonalds delivers!

To recap: Army chow good. Korean Army chow bad. McDonalds as good as ever. 

The Army, Crowds, Battleship, and Doom Scenarios

Meandering through the Incheon Airport toward Gate 115 (it's a really big airport), heading home from training with the ROK Army, I was pretty fascinated with how well airports work.

Any airport is a complicated organism. A behemoth like Incheon is almost a wonder of human precision. I don't presume to know what it takes to manage an airport, but watching the crowds of passengers find their way pretty effortlessly to where they need to be reminded me of something I wrote in Nine Weeks about  lines and crowds:

It’s natural to want to find the most efficient route through any circuit, but futile in any Army one. Whatever time is saved finding paths of less resistance is lost waiting for the rest of the group to catch up. Moreover, our NCOs displayed a compulsive desire to try to manage any movement of troops, when usually the randomness of the crowd would otherwise find the smoothest configuration. The free market versus a command economy was Basic Training. Everything was centrally-planned, and all power was held by those managers that allocated resources. No trust whatever was afforded to the individual to make a wise decision, and something as important as getting people in the right lines was too risky to leave to the collective judgment.

I think, outside of strict training environments like Boot Camp and OCS, the Army understands this. It takes more resources controlling a crowd than it is worth, especially when that crowd will do what you want if you leave it alone, most of the time.

Then, on the flight, I gave in to the temptation to watch Battleship, which was a lot better than I expected. But one scene fit in with the thought above. When the aliens had attacked, news clips narrated a tale of earthlings in panic...societies in chaos-- even in areas that weren't under attack.

Prof. Sean Lawson contributed to the literature debunking the myth of social chaos resulting from disaster. His paper is about cyber doom scenarios, but the pattern is the same: when normal life is interrupted (by an earthquake or an extra-terrestrial invasion) central planners, military types, and others with a stake in the public safety/ security business think everyone will start looting and killing their neighbors.

But that rarely happens. People pretty much do what they need to do, most of the time. It's a good paper, so I think I'll write about it more in another post.

Right now, I'm excited to get home to my wife and kids and tell them all about my Korean adventures.