Projection

The older I get, the more I am convinced of the truth that we tend to project onto others those faults and foibles we ourselves struggle with.  There is a liberal columnist whose syndicated column appears in my local paper a couple of times each week.  I disagree with him on virtually every topic, but what really galls me is his self-righteous, finger-wagging attitude.  In every one of his columns he climbs on his high horse and acts as if he is the sole possessor of the moral high ground.

Why does this bother me so much?  Why should I even care?

I think it’s because, as much as I hate to admit it, he and I are probably very much alike.  As a Christian, I understand that both of us share humanity’s fallen nature – we are all sinners.  But it’s deeper than that.  Why do I sense pride and self-righteous egotism oozing from his writing?  Like most liberals, he writes passionately about social justice issues, particularly race.  I’m sure many of his readers admire this passion and concern, whether they completely agree with him or not.  Perhaps the reason I get so incensed when I read his columns is because where others see passion and concern, I see moral superiority, and there’s no way I’m going to let someone with the “incorrect” positions on the issues get away with acting as if he is morally superior to me!
 

But , if I’m honest, I’d have to admit that I’m no different than him.

My natural tendency is to bristle at and criticize people who act as though they are superior (in other words people who tend to bristle at and criticize others!).  If I were a man of true humility, I would be more concerned with getting the log out of my own eye before trying to point out specks in the eyes of others.  But there is a little policeman inside of me that sees it as his duty to “call out” those who don’t follow the rules and who behave as though the rules don’t apply to them.  Here’s how idiotic it can get:  on my drive home from work, I often take the carpool lane (because I carpool), but I am keenly aware of single drivers who try to “get away with” driving in the carpool lane.  So what do I do?  If I see a “single ship” driver coming up behind me in the carpool lane I will slow down to match the rest of the traffic.  I do this intentionally to frustrate him, but more importantly, to make sure he knows that I know that he is a jerk and a lawbreaker!

Again, I have to ask myself the question, “why is this so important to me?”  Why is it important that I be right?  Why do I chafe at the notion that there is someone who thinks they are “better” than me?

The answer is that I am a sinner who does not rightly acknowledge the dominion and authority of the Most High God.  I have often identified with the psalmist when he says, “I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked… they are not stricken like the rest of mankind… pride is their necklace… their hearts overflow with follies”  (Psalm 73).  He even goes on to say, “in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence”.  Yet the author of Psalm 73 also goes on to say, “when my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you”.  In other words, my indignation is nothing more than envy of those whom God alone can and will judge.  God’s Holy Spirit “pricks my heart” and causes me to realize my sin.  That God in His mercy would discipline me to be aware of my own pride and sinfulness is truly a blessing!

In one sense I am no different than my antagonist columnist.  Yet, by God’s grace, I can become more aware of my own failings, and instead of driving me into bitterness and anger, He will turn my heart to repentance and an acknowledgment of His sovereign goodness.  I will still struggle with pride and arrogance, but I know the victory has already been won. 

It is only God’s grace that differentiates me from my antagonist; nothing inherent in my own self-righteousness.  I pray God may deal as mercifully with him as He has with me!

The Danger of Authority Without Responsibility

Bureaucracies are strange things. Once created, they tend to perpetuate themselves and often grow into large, unwieldy corporate entities that take on a life of their own. I happen to work for one of the world’s largest and most notorious bureaucracies, the Federal Government of the United States. Specifically, I work for the Department of Defense, perhaps the largest bureaucracy within the US government. In my more cynical moments, when people ask me what I do for a living, I’ll tell them that I am a bureaucrat.

In almost thirty years of working directly for the DoD, either in uniform or as a civilian, I have come to the conclusion that the US military bureaucracy is too large, too top-heavy, and has developed a pathological culture of risk aversion, obstructionism, and excessive consensus-building. This has created a situation, devastating to organizations in general, in which most low- and mid-level bureaucrats are given responsibility with little or no authority, and most high-level bureaucrats (generals, admirals and senior civilians) have a great deal of authority and little, if any real responsibility. Such a situation directly violates one of the most basic tenets of leadership, which is that one should be given authority commensurate with one’s responsibility.

How did we get to this point? Put simply, there are too many people at the top with not enough real responsibility; so they have to create it. According to author Richard A. Gabriel, “Since Vietnam, the percentage of officers has fallen to 11 percent of total force strength. Curiously, however, as the number of officers relative to enlisted strength has declined since the war in Vietnam, the ratio of general officers to troop strength has increased by 31 percent. The Army has more general officers relative to the number of troops it can put in the field than it did during Vietnam. And the same is true of the Navy and the Air Force as well”. Since not every general or admiral is in the field commanding troops, what are they doing? They are in charge of large staff sections in the Pentagon or one of the several regional or functional commands around the world. Often, they are deputies or special assistants to higher ranking flag officers or senior civilians at the assistant or under-secretary level.

Here then, is the situation: you have a surfeit of ambitious, high ranking officers filling positions, many of which are of questionable value-added to the mission of the US military. Because they are flag officers, they possess a great deal of power and influence. Because they are ambitious, they frequently create an entire small fiefdom around themselves, dedicated to the advancement of a particular political, programmatic or policy agenda which will lead to their own promotion to the next higher rank. Thus, because this tendency is pervasive across the military establishment, a huge amount of work is generated by these individuals. Their staffs churn out hundreds of Power Point briefings, position papers, information papers, studies and analyses, most of which will become “shelf ware”. The low- to mid-level bureaucrats who prepare all of this material work extremely hard and are very diligent. Yet they often have little, if any, sense of the significance of their labor. They are rarely given any authority to speak for, or make decisions on behalf of, their organizations.

All this creates a culture of risk aversion. No one wants to fail or be seen to be incompetent. So incompetence and failure among senior officers is masked and diluted by the sheer number of senior officers and the creation of elaborate “governance” structures consisting of boards, steering groups and other “consensus building” bodies of which they are members. Thus, no one individual can be blamed for making a poor decision. Of course, these boards and steering groups require secretariat staffs to prepare all the briefing materials and coordinate the agenda – more activity leading to more shelf ware.

This practice of consensus building as a means to insure oneself against criticism has generated a strange practice called Joint Staff Action Plan (JSAP) staffing. Let’s say my office within the Joint Staff is the proponent for security assistance training, and my general wants to write a new security assistance policy for the military. A draft of this document must be circulated to every office in the Pentagon, every major joint command and every DoD Agency for comment. This is usually done three times: at the “action officer” (bureaucrat) level, the Colonel (Navy Captain) level, and the Flag Officer/General Officer level. Any comments considered “critical” must be successfully adjudicated with the commenting organization. Such a process stifles creativity and innovation, discourages risk taking, and tends to result in outcomes that give the appearance of progress, but in reality simply “kick the can down the road” and perpetuate the status quo.

Congress is the only organization in the Federal government authorized to establish the size and makeup of the US military. Legislation should be introduced and passed that will fix a target ratio of senior officers and civilians in the DoD at a level far lower than today. This target can be achieved through the gradual attrition of senior officers through the normal retirement process. Congress should also hold hearings to determine the necessity of the continued existence of non-warfighting commands and staffs, both at the Service and Joint levels.

The history of successful militaries, from the Roman legions to the German general staff in WWII, to the Israeli army, has shown that the most effective and efficient fighting forces can be fielded with a relatively few, key experienced and talented senior leaders. And we should never forget that the mission of the US military is to win our nation’s wars, not to provide a career path for high level bureaucrats.

Constitutional Government is Small Government

I carry around with me a little copy of the Constitution of the United States. It’s easy to do, since it’s a very small document. Even with all of the amendments, a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution (along with the Declaration of Independence) is only about sixty pages in length. It is the supreme law of the land, and contains within its various articles the framework and specified powers for the Federal government of this country. The reason this document is so small is because there are actually very few powers specifically given to the national government. For example, Article I, Section 8 lays out the powers of the Congress. They are limited to: taxation, providing for the common defense (raising an Army and Navy) and declaring war, regulating commerce with foreign nations, establishing naturalization laws, coining (and borrowing) money, establishing post offices and post roads, granting patents, and other various duties such as protecting the nation from piracy and calling up the militia. The tenth amendment states in its entirety, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”.

Why then, do we have a Federal government involved in every aspect of our daily life, from education, to health care, to dictating to private corporations? It’s a very long story, but we now live in a country where the unbridled power of the Federal government overshadows every aspect of government. Is this what the founders of our nation envisioned? We have become so used to the influence of Washington in our everyday lives that we take it for granted. But the Constitution does not authorize the kind of power our national government has appropriated for itself.

I’ve frequently asked myself what our country would be like if we actually had a Federal government that existed within the proscriptions of the Constitution. Would we be able to function? Wouldn’t many things just not get done? What is the role of the Federal government, the governments of the various States, local municipalities, and the private sector in providing the necessary services we need to have a functional and thriving society? I’ll try to walk through a few examples of areas where both government and the private sector are involved and do a thought experiment about what “small government” might look like.

Transportation. We have a system of Federal highways that culminated with the Interstate highway system that was essentially completed in the 1960s. Would we have been able to build such a system without Federal tax money or incentives? I suspect that such a system could have been suggested and planned at the Federal level, but the administration of its construction could clearly have been carried out with the States raising the revenue and overseeing the construction. The only real role for the Federal government (according to the Constitution) would be to regulate the commerce those roads carried between the States.

Education. We have a long history and tradition of local schools in this country; public schools financed by local taxes. The role of the Federal government in education of our nation’s youth is nowhere authorized in the Constitution. Unfortunately, the selective granting of Federal money to States and localities to support education has encouraged them to depend on the Federal government and look to it for revenue. It also makes it much easier for the Federal government to dictate to the States in areas of regulation of schools.

Social Welfare. It began with the passage of the Social Security act in the 1930s, but has grown to include Medicare, Medicaid, and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, commonly known as “welfare”. What was viewed initially as a step toward providing a minimum level of financial security to those unable to work either through old age or disability has become a huge system of Federal taxes that find their way into the general revenue fund and have not kept pace with the changing demographics of the nation. It can be argued that welfare programs have actually encouraged the breakup of families, when women are compensated by the Federal government for raising children out of wedlock. The current push to “reform” health care by setting up a so-called “public” insurance option and then mandating that all Americans purchase it or be guilty of breaking the law will only exacerbate the problem, raising Federal taxes and further limiting the ability of the States and the private sector to provide a vital marketplace for medical treatment and catastrophic medical insurance coverage.

The only constitutionally authorized Federal agency still providing services is the U.S. Postal Service. But do we even need a Federal Post Office? Why can’t FedEx, UPS, or any number of other private delivery companies bid on regional postal contracts for the delivery of mail? Could we eliminate the Department of Education? What would be the effect on our schools? I suspect it would not be negative. One might argue that there are Federal agencies, the elimination of which could be detrimental to the welfare and safety of the nation. The Federal Aviation Administration comes to mind. But I think it is a worthwhile exercise to systematically work one’s way through the Federal bureaucracy and analyze the degree to which an agency’s function is either 1) necessary, 2) could be performed by a State or municipal government, or 3) could be addressed through free market competition in the private sector. At the very least, such an analysis must be performed before rushing to the conclusion that every perceived problem must be solved through Federal legislation and the subsequent establishment of another Federal agency.

The size of our Federal government is largely our own fault. Part of the problem is that we continue to elect representatives to Congress whom we reward with reelection when they bring Federal dollars to their home districts. This is classic “pork barrel politics”, and it does nothing except make the problem worse. Until we begin to disassociate Federal representation with Federal largesse, government will continue to grow. A Constitutional amendment limiting terms of Federal representatives and Senators would go a long way toward relocating governmental power in the United States to where it primarily belongs: to the States and the People.

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Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced a bill in the Senate calling for the constitutional amendment described above.

A Proposal for Improving Traffic Flow and Highway Safety

In my post from October 18^th, I promised that in a future posting I would share some ideas I have about solutions to traffic congestion that might make you chuckle. Well, today is that day. In that post, I suggested that it might be possible to improve the capacity of highways through means other than simply adding more roads or widening existing ones. The way to do this was to address the two components of traffic flow, namely traffic density and average velocity. The previous article dealt with the issue of traffic density. Today, I’d like to discuss the speed component, and how we might be able to use technology to improve traffic flow.

Let’s say it’s a bright, sunny morning; there are very few cars on the road. You seem to have the whole road to yourself. How do you decide how fast to drive? If the posted speed limit is 65, you might figure you could get away with setting your cruise control at about 72 and be relatively safe from the State Patrol. You feel that you are driving safely: the road is dry, visibility is good, and there is little traffic. In fact, you might be able to drive for miles without even changing lanes.

Now let’s change the scenario: It’s still dry and sunny, and you’re still able to drive at 72 mph, but now the road is crowded with other vehicles, all moving at about the same speed. The highway is reaching its theoretical maximum capacity, which is that moment just before the density reaches the point at which cars are so close to one another that the slightest decrease in the speed of one car will result in a massive compression wave traveling backwards through traffic until the average velocity plummets to near zero. Here’s my question: What causes that one car to slow down so suddenly? It seems to me that if we were able to minimize such sudden decreases in speed of individual vehicles, we might be able to maintain a higher average traffic velocity and therefore a more efficient use of the existing roadway capacity.

So, here is my hypothesis: If we are able to reduce the number of lane changes of individual drivers, there will be fewer instances of other drivers having to brake to avoid colliding with these drivers cutting in an out of traffic. The reduced instances of braking will generate a smoother flow of traffic , resulting in higher traffic flow and fewer accidents. Stated another way, to the extent drivers keep to the same lane, overall traffic velocity will remain high enough to maintain an efficient traffic flow. Assuming this hypothesis is true, I believe the technology is available today to provide a solution.

Why do drivers change lanes? There really is only one reason: to overtake other drivers. Why would someone want to do that? There may be a number of irrational reasons (competition, a sense of superiority, etc.) and I’m certainly not qualified to go into the psychology of driving behavior. But the rational reason is simply that most drivers want to be able to travel at the speed they choose. If my “chosen” speed is 72 in a 65 mph zone, and the traffic is moving at 58, I will continue to change lanes to “get ahead” of slower drivers until I reach a point where I can drive, unhindered, at 72. Realistically, of course, this never happens if the traffic is very dense. Aggressive drivers who are constantly changing lanes never really manage to get to their destinations much more quickly than they would have if they had “gone with the flow”. But in the process, they create disruptions in the traffic flow that increase the likelihood of collisions and force other drivers to react to their behavior by making sudden braking or steering maneuvers.

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies may be useful in gradually curbing excessive lane changing. Consider a stretch of interstate highway, slightly modified so that there are magnetic sensors placed at regular intervals along the lane markers. When a car makes a lane change and moves over one or more of these sensors, an on-board computer records the lane change; keeping a running total. The computer then calculates the number of lane changes per mile traveled. At the end of the year, during the car's annual safety inspection, the data in the computer are downloaded and sent to the state Department of Motor Vehicles. The lane-change per mile factor for that vehicle is then compared against values derived from a historical database of driving patterns. Excessive lane changers might be assessed a monetary fine or awarded negative driving points based on the past year's data. Gradually, either driver behavior will improve or such drivers will lose their licenses and be taken off the road.

The ITS-based solution I propose gets to the heart of the speed enforcement problem: Vehicle speed by itself is not the issue; it is speed relative to other vehicles. If I am a law enforcement officer, I am more concerned about the aggressive driver weaving in and out of traffic than the lone driver on a remote highway in Montana or Nevada who is driving above the speed limit.

For those who may be concerned that this proposal violates civil liberties or privacy, I will only offer that the license to drive a motor vehicle on public highways is a privilege granted by the state, not an absolute right. The state has a compelling interest in protecting its citizens and providing a safe driving environment for its licensed drivers. Collecting such data from a vehicle’s computer is no different than the collection of GPS location data by trucking companies of their drivers’ whereabouts. It is in the company’s interest to ensure its drivers stay on the route and are on time, and the acknowledgment of this data collection is a condition of employment.

We have reached a point in the development and management of our national highway system where we have to begin thinking creatively about solutions to traffic congestion and safety problems. If state departments of transportation knew it was possible to increase the traffic flow volume on a stretch of interstate highway without adding another lane, wouldn’t it be worth pursuing simply from a cost standpoint? If highway safety officials knew it was possible to reduce the number of accidents per highway mile and ease the jagged nerves of commuters at the same time through the use of ITS, wouldn't it make sense to investigate? The answer to both these questions is yes; and it will take real vision and bold action at the state and federal level if society is to get the most benefit from ITS.