“To change anything in the Navy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.” — Franklin Roosevelt, 1940 San Diego — What the former assistant secretary of the Navy said is descriptive of the entire military. Each service’s culture, and interservice rivalries, and bureaucratic viscosity are resistant to reform. Which is why the next secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, has the most difficult management challenge in American government.
.. For about $500,000 in expenditures, the 9/11 attackers did over $2 trillion in damage to the United States and the world economy. The linked physical and cyber infrastructures of complex societies are vulnerable to such asymmetries.
.. The nation just experienced a raucous presidential campaign during which there was silence about the crisis of the entitlement state — an aging population’s pension and health-care entitlements swallowing government resources, with alarming national-security implications. But technology, pursued determinedly, has the potential to make peace through making deterrent strength less expensive.
Donald Trump Is Staffing His Administration with TPP Supporters
Gen. Mattis joined 16 other retired military leaders and former defense secretaries in a May 2015 letter to congressional leaders that said TPP would help the U.S. maintain a geopolitical advantage in Asia.
Meet the US Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier
The new tech can accelerate a 100,000 pound object to a speed of 125 miles per hour in less than 300 feet.
Bill Gates Book: The Myth of the Strong Leader
“The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age.”
the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be ‘strong leaders.’
.. Gates explains Brown’s core argument, a leadership truism many will recognize. “Despite a worldwide fixation on strength as a positive quality, strong leaders — those who concentrate power and decision-making in their own hands — are not necessarily good leaders,” Gates writes.” Instead, Brown’s book posits that those who make the biggest difference “are the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate — the ones who recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers.”
.. “I alone can fix it”
.. an American from Dallas came up to me and looked to see what I was doing. And he said, ‘well, America needs a strong leader and Donald Trump is a strong leader.’ There’s anecdotal evidence and survey evidence that one of the attractions of Donald Trump is that people thought he was a strong leader. I argue that there are lots of other qualities, which are more useful than strength, as defined by someone who’s domineering and maximizes power, and that being a strong leader and being an effective leader are not quite the same thing.
.. the Trump campaign wasn’t characterized by humility.
.. It remains to be seen what kind of team he’ll complete. So far it seems to be a mixture of billionaires and generals
.. the tone of the campaign — was unlike any in my lifetime. It was so aggressive. It’s one thing to say that you want to defeat your rival. But to say that the rival should be in jail — that was something more reminiscent of a third world country.
..
Many people saw Trump as a charismatic leader and then projected their hopes and their existing disappointments. They projected what they wanted to sense onto Trump. It’s rather strange that he was seen as the champion of blue-collar workers when the people he’s appointed [to the Cabinet so far] tend to be people who are very far removed from that milieu. This is a classic example of charisma being bestowed upon somebody.
.. Somebody who paints a bold picture, however remote it may be from reality, is probably more likely to be deemed to have charisma.
.. That the worship of strength, in the sense of domination and maximization, is the worship of a false god. There are other qualities that are more important in a leader — integrity, intelligence, collegiality, empathy, having a questioning mind — and if we’re very lucky, the person has vision as well.
.. I’m defining strength in the conventional way, as someone who is a maximizer of their power and wants to dominate all and sundry.
.. Eisenhower, a general, would be sitting at his desk saying ‘Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army.’ Trump is used to being in charge of his business empire. How hard is it for someone accustomed to that kind of hierarchy to make the adjustment?
.. I would hesitate to say what kind of president he’s going to be. When he’s faced with the fact that he can’t simply issue a set of instructions and it’ll automatically happen — because it’s a very complex political system and there are still checks and balances — how he reacts to that will be very important.
.. Why do you think people are so drawn to this dichotomy between strong versus weak leaders?
It’s hard to say. There’s something rather primitive about it. Going back to a time when there were clans and people looking to the chief, the person who was the ruler was also usually the strongest person or the greatest military person in the group.