Another detail that struck me regarding Fabius Maximus’ latest article was his seemingly contradictory views of science and rationality. On the one hand, Fabius seems to feel that the West’s focus on rationality is a weakness:

We produce manuals and books, hundreds of pages long. Rational, logical, analytical… While we think and write, they send suicide bombers…We are fighting an offensive war without [the] power of these primal drives. Perhaps that is one reason we are losing.

Apparently Fabius believes that rationality will not save us from the irrational hordes driven by primal powers of violence. But he goes on to claim that the tradition of the Enlightenment will save us:

…western peoples have brought to bear on this problem an even greater strength: our free, competitive intellectual climate… People write proposals, which circulate and receive intense review. As scientists know, even failure moves us forward by showing us what does not work.

So we are crippled by excessive rational reading and writing, yet our free competitive intellectual climate (with all its reading and writing of proposals) is our strength? This seems confused.

I wonder if the apparent contradiction arises from Fabius’ criticism for overly tech-centric theories of warfare (hence his wariness of any claims that scientific theories of strategy will save us). His still believes that science (with its principles of the free exchange of ideas and reasoned discourse) will lead us to better solutions, he just wants to make sure that this discourse does not attempt to create some simplistic science of strategy.

I’ve been so busy that I didn’t catch this til today. Roberta Wohlstetter, author of Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision and wife of Albert Wohlstter, died last Saturday at the age of 94. Several sources have written excellent obituaries, including RAND, WSJ, WaPo, and the NY Sun. The Sun’s obit mistakenly associates Albert Wohlstetter with the idea of “keeping nuclear-laden B-52 bombers constantly fueled and aloft” (in point of fact, he explicitly rejected this operational concept in R-290 for being too costly and providing negligible security), but otherwise I’ve found coverage to be accurate.

The most fitting way I can think of to honor Roberta Wohlstetter’s memory is to share one of her classically succinct insights. Discussing the causes of the failure to forsee the Pearl Harbor attack, she argued that was

…much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings

UPDATE #2

Robert Zarate, whose book on the Wohlstetters I cannot wait for, has an excellent round up of obituaries and anecdotes. He also caught a mistaken citation - Wohlstetter offered the concept of fail safe in R-290, not R-266. Since I don’t know of any versions of R-290 available on the web, however, I’ll leave a link to R-266 here.