"The reason bureaucracies fail, Fox tells us, is '...because they are, in some sense, inhuman.' By this he doesn't {mean} that they are vicious or cruel (although they can be), but that they are, by their very nature, at odds with human nature as it exists. Bureaucracies operate according to a certain fixed set of procedures. They are an attempt - heroic or otherwise - to force the world to conform to a rational system. But human beings, much as we pride ourselves on our rational thinking, are actually a grab-bag of instincts, intuition, and habit, with a handful of rationality thrown in to pull everything else together. This serves us well because it matches how the universe actually works, but it also means that there will always be a conflict between bureaucracies and human beings. "
This explains a lot. If you've ever been around government & it's workers, you realize that they're no more perfect, and frequently just as fallible as anyone else. Legislators may have had the best intentions in mind, but laws are implemented by people who are often more interested in their own concerns that yours.
"nothing is more irrational than warfare. We practice it only because it can accomplish things that rational behavior can't. The British forgot this. The Iranians did not."
hmmmm
"Bureaucratic functionalism had taken the place of the military virtues. Somehow the Iranians sensed this. Perhaps by observing the routine, perhaps by intercepting radio traffic. Perhaps simply through noticing that women were driving the boats. Seeing that they were not, in the strict sense, dealing with a military operation, they made their move, and they got away with it."
War is not politically correct ... don't expect it to be pretty or easy.
"a legendary navy, the navy of Gravelines, and Trafalgar, and the Falklands, the navy that destroyed the slave trade and the Nazi U-boats, is gone with scarcely a whimper."
. . .
"with this human bomb in their midst, what did the administration of Virginia Tech decide to do? They declared the campus a 'gun-free zone', apparently under the impression that stating the fact would make it so. This assured Cho that he could operate without being interfered with in any way whatsoever. (The legacy media has failed to grasp that 'gun-free' also applied to the school's security forces, who were effectively disarmed.)"
Repeat 5,000 times: "criminals don't obey laws", then explain to me why taking guns away from the innocent helps any situation.
"we're depending on this form of organization for our survival - and it is failing us. Bureaucracy is a major tool of our civilization, to a greater extent than any other before us. We can't get by without it, but we're rapidly approaching a point where we can't live with it either.
It used to be understood that there were situations where you threw out the rulebook. When FDR wanted to start a covert operations service, he ignored the established bureaucracy and turned instead to 'Wild Bill' Donovan, a Manhattan businessman (and Republican to boot). The result was the Office of Strategic Services, a ripe gaggle of New York socialites, lawyers, communists, homosexuals, and adventurers who got the job done while breaking every rule in existence. As soon as the war was over, the OSS was rolled up - there was never any hope it would fit in with a peacetime bureaucracy."
If you haven't done it, definitely find the time to read about the early days of the OSS .
"what can we do? There is no possibility of reform. 'The ‘internal contradictions' of bureaucracy,' Fox tells us, 'are indeed chronic; they are incurable. No amount of social science tinkering is going to do more than cover the patient with bandaids.'
Any attempted reforms will be carried out under bureaucratic procedure. They will meet all the criteria, they will be approved by every committee, and they will be perfectly satisfactory right up until the appearance of the next maniac with a pistol or gang of Jihadis attempting to flatten an American city.
Similarly, there's little point in asking for higher-quality, more spirited personnel. Such individuals will seldom attempt a career as a bureaucrat in the first place, and when they do, the bureaucracy often moves heaven and earth to stymie them. (See the recent adventures of Paul Wolfowitz.)
In the end we'll simply have to depend on ourselves. Forget all the bureaucratic procedures, promises, and guarantees. Events have proven them empty."
Survivalists living far from cities may have come to this conclusion earlier than most of us, but we can't all live like that - we must teach ourselves to survive in cities.
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