Halfway there

All signs point to the end of my time in Afghanistan drawing closer and closer.  Fall has arrived, officially.  The air is getting cooler, the pomegranates are ripe, and the grapes have been harvested.  Snow is beginning to cap the mountains that loom over the city.  The last batch of my office mates to go on R&R have just returned.  And I now have less time remaining than I have accumulated.  Though the days are still going by quickly, in truth, they can't go by quickly enough.  Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying this assignment.  The work I do here is extremely satisfying, and my co-workers keep me sane through the long hours.  But I can only stand being half a world away from home for so long. 

 

In celebration of my halfway mark, I'm looking forward to the end.  Here are some things I can't wait to get home to, and some things I can't wait to leave behind.  Some are big, some are small, some are obvious, but none of them can come soon enough.

 

Things I'm looking forward to at home:

 

- My wife.  Going to bed alone every night sucks.  Being limited to 10-15 minute conversations over the phone every day sucks.  Throwing up for two days without anyone there to take care of you sucks. 

 

- My kids.  My three little girls are growing fast, and I'm missing a lot of milestones while I'm over here.  First day of kindergarten, first day of pre-school, first gymnastics meet, first soccer goal scored.  I'm hopeful that I'll be home before Christmas to spend part of the holiday season with them and catch up on all I've missed. 

 

- Normal work hours.  The fewest hours I've worked in a two week pay period while deployed has been 156, and that included the first days I was on camp and was allowed to sleep off my jet lag.  This pay period is going to be close to 170 hours.  I get paid overtime, so the money is great, but stringing together 80+ hour weeks for 26 straight weeks is brutal.  Thankfully, I get a weekend to recharge...

 

- Weekends.  About those.  The weekend here lasts from end of work Thursday evening (whatever time that may end up being) to 1 PM Friday afternoon.  I sleep through most of it in order to recharge my batteries from 12-14 hour days.  Time to myself that doesn't come at the expense of sleep would be awesome.

 

- Fast, unfiltered, cheap internet.  The internet at work is approaching fast, but most sites are blocked, so no surfing even after work is done.  The internet you can pay for (at $100 a month) is unfiltered, but it can take a minute for a site to load, and several hours for videos on YouTube.  Don't even think about trying to download games or movies or music.  Skype video freezes up and becomes unuseable within 5 minutes.  Yes, I am aware I am complaining about having crappy internet in the middle of a combat zone.  I am glad that it exists, and it is better than nothing.  But I want my cable internet back.

 

- A good storm.  Unfortunately I'm going to miss all the fun, noisy, summer storms, but at this point I'd take snow just the same.  The weather here is BORING.  Cloudless and sunny 95% of the time.  I want some overcast, rainy, mellow days to break up the monotony.  My home in the Midwest has plenty in supply.  Here, not so much.

 

 

Things I look forward to leaving behind:

 

- That Afghanistan smell.  Dirt.  Sewage.  Hash smoke.  Dead flies rotting in the fly traps.  I border on vomiting from the stench a few times a week on average.  Will.  Not.  Miss.

 

- The air.  The air quality here sucks.  Kabul sits in a bowl, much like L.A.  All the smoke produced by the locals burning things is trapped, contributing to the problem.  I've heard it gets worse in the winter, as people will burn anything they can get their hands on in order to keep warm.  On top of that, an air quality study done here shortly after I arrived found that 17% of the particulate in the air was human feces.  Yummy.  The one time I went for a run outside, I got sick the next day, and I'm convinced it was from sucking down the dirty air in large quanities. 

 

- Dirty looks when I use my camera.  People are super paranoid about cameras here.  It's either someone that believes taking pictures of the cats at the DFAC is a violation of operational security, or shows obvious disdain because photography lowers me to "tourist" status.  I had one Army sergeant make fun of me because I went through a lot of effort to get pictures of the Secretary of Defense when he visited a few weeks ago.  I know what I'm not allowed to take pictures of, and I don't point the lens in that direction.  The people that try and control me beyond that are extremly irritating.

 

- Football games at midnight.  I like the NFL, but I just can't stay up that late to watch the games.  We do get to see some of the replayed at more sane hours of the day, but most of the fun is taken out of it when you already know the final score.

 

- Guys with guns guarding where I sleep.  I am thankful they are there to protect me, but I will be happier when I am sleeping in a place where the protection is not required. 

 

- Politics.  I'm tired of my analysis being used as a weapon to further someone's agenda.  Analysis should be objective, and speak the truth, not subjective and speak the catch phrase of the week. 

 

 

I could probably come up with a lot more, but those are the highlights.  I am thankful that I am on the downhill slide to seeing these things come to pass.  The thought of home is staving off burn out from the long hours.  I am hoping hard that that continues.

 

Happy Autumn everyone.  Out here.

Patriot Day

 

 

The day was cool, but the sun was warm, making my shoulders itch under my uniform.  I stood at parade rest, an uncomfortable position of half-attention with my hands clasped at the waist behind my back.  On my right was a small table with two oil lamps and a notebook filled with with names of those who have been killed in action the past nine years.  On my left hung an American flag, on which were written the names of all emergency personnel killed when the Twin Towers fell.  On the other side of the flag plaza hung a similar flag, with the names of the people killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United 93.  In between were myself and my office mates, paying our respects to the victims of the attacks on 9/11 and all those that have fallen defending us from a repeat performance.  Standing guard over the memorial, we honored their memory, and paused to reflect on the road we've traveled through the aftermath.

 

As I stood immobile, my thoughts wandered across the topic at hand.  11 September 2001 I was sitting in my high school psychology class, watching the world change along with everyone else.  Outside the window planes headed to various destinations around the country were ordered to land, leaving racetrack contrails in the sky.  Not once did I imagine that the events of that day would draw me, nine years later, to Afghanistan, fighting the same fight that started that day in New York.  My stream of consciousness wandered the path I'd walked from that day to this one.  I thought about all the actions taken in the name of defending America from further terrorist actions.  I wondered if the people who's names were printed on the flags I was honoring would approve of what we've done in their names, what we continue to do. 

 

Nine years of war.  Nine years.  My children do not know America in peace.  My entire adult life has played out under the spectre of conflict.  The length speaks to the immensity of the task, but also to all the mis-steps we've made. 

 

No one - no one - expected American troops to be in the same theatre of war for nearly a decade.  If someone predicted nearly a decade of combat lay ahead of us on September 12th, they would have been ridiculed.  Mocked.  Because it would have been ridiculous.  The military machine was powering into high gear, and we were told the conflict would be mere months, even weeks, of American troops steam rolling the mountains of Afghanistan flat, crushing the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Osama in their wake.  Iraq was immaterial.  The enemy had painted concentric circles on Afghanistan, and the U.S. was warming up for target practice.  We were not likely to miss.

 

Unsurprisingly, the resistance was quickly crushed.  But what we didn't know until too late was that we didn't crush them effectively enough.  Distracted by our own success and playing second fiddle to the "real" shooting war in Iraq, we allowed our enemy to slink away, bloody but unbowed, struck down but not destroyed.  We squandered the time we had to make sure there was no way for them to crawl back to their former stronghold.  And here, nine years later, we're paying for letting them off the mat daily with lives of soldiers both U.S. and Coalition.  We're paying for our failure to secure the country then with added years of conflict, money and responsibility.  And nine years later, we find ourselves in a position to ask, "Is this worth it?"  On 11 September 2001, no one could have imagined that this question could be anything but rhetorical.  How do we answer it now?

 

I mused about what I would tell my children about this day and it's consequences when they were old enough to grasp it's magnitude.  How will I explain hate and terrorism, pre-emptive strikes and IEDs, asymmetric warfare and little white headstones, when I don't fully understand them myself?  Can I adequately word the confusion, and subsequent nausea, felt throughout America as the realization that two planes striking two towers in less than 20 minutes could not possibly be an accident?  How can I explain the enormous courage displayed as the FDNY rushed into a building doomed to die, when every natural human instinct was to run away?  How do I convey the black grief in the sound of 343 emergency beacons chirping in unison, their owners buried under falling rubble, never to rise from the street?  Is it possible to transmit the pure hatred towards our government and their actions circa 2005 to someone that didn't experience it themselves?

 

My relief stepped lightly up the marble steps and stood in front of me.  He spoke quietly.  "I stand ready to relieve you."  I replied, "I stand relieved."  In normal circumstances, the soldier would have rendered salute, but being a civilian and unable to return the courtesy, he did not extend it, instead exchanging curt nods of acknowledgment.  I stepped aside and he took my place, folding one hand behind his back, the other holding the barrel of his rifle skyward, the stock balanced on the ground.  Down the steps for a group photo, and then back to the office, and working towards bringing us home sooner than later.

 

And as I stepped away from the flag plaza, I wondered, where will my steps take me from here?

 

Wow is too small a word.  Courtesy of reddit.com.

/salute

 

Out here.

Black Magic

Math is hard for most people. It's confusing and requires different thought patterns that have to be cultivated. Starting with addition and moving up the ladder of operations and subjects, most people start to get a brain cramp around algebra, glaze over at geometry, and stop paying attention at trigonometry. This isn't any different in the military. The percentage of people who are capable with math is higher than the normal population (among the officers that is, no data on the enlisted ranks), but it still is quickly confusing to most soldiers. Especially the kinds of funky things we end up doing. Most of these guys were taught to shoot guns, drive tanks, or blow things up, not differentiate or run analysis of variance. We often joke about our models being the "Black Box of Mystery". Repeatedly adding numbers in a spreadsheet is treated like black magic. I'm sure calculus would be like alien technology. It would be funny if it weren't so darn inconvenient.

Math addled brains cause two large headaches in my life.

First: because most leaders do not understand math at a deep level, they trust you to understand it, and convey it to them correctly. If you gain their trust by presenting them with solid analysis, they will be more inclined to trust you in the future. If you screw up, and lose their trust, it is very difficult to get back.

Unfortunately for us analysts, numbers can be made to say anything. Inserting bias in numbers is extremely easy if you know what message you want to convey. (For example: a few years ago a river boat gambling proposition came up on the ballot in Missouri. The advertising campaign for this measure claimed that "84% of residents in X area voted 'Yes' on this measure in June in order to get it to a state wide vote". In actuality, 84% of the voter population had turned out to vote, and the measure had passed. The message of the ad implied that 84% of people had voted yes, when in actuality, 84% of people had VOTED, and the overall answer was yes. The difference is subtle, but striking, and was pretty tough to catch in a 30 second TV spot.)

As a result, those whose reputations are established on the accuracy of our number crunching, such as analysts like myself, must be very careful to represent our analysis as accurately as is possible. We are painstaking in our work, often having multiple co-workers check over our calculations for mistakes. We vet the assumptions our work is based on through the subject matter experts, so that we can reasonably conclude that our work is based on solid foundations. We are purposefully spirited away in a dark corner of the command structure so that there is no possibility of a general officer barging in our door demanding that we modify a spreadsheet. We regularly accompany briefers during their meetings to make sure someone is present that can accurately explain the analysis, and characterize the results. And, after learning the hard way, we never, ever, trust our raw data with anyone outside of our office.

That hard way I speak of. Oh yes. There are those who use the numbers we produce for evil. Aye. Evil. There have been instances where organizations have taken our data out of context. *Gasp* Unpossible, you say? It gets worse! There have been instances where organizations have taken our data files, changed the data points, and ran to the boss with the new "analysis" that fit their agenda. Dastardly villains they are. We don't like them. Of course if any questions are imposed upon these people they simply throw up their hands and say "The ORSAs gave it to us!" And short of having a duel with 9 MM pistols in the general's office, we usually have to swallow our vomit and take the beating.

The alternate route of deception is more underhanded. Recently we performed analysis for a group that I would consider shaky. The numbers were fine, but there were bunches and bunches of "IFs" that had to be met to get to those numbers. "If" we do this and "if" we do that then the whole world just looks better and better. And imagine, no one was talking about the probability of meeting all those "ifs", even when probed. Repeatedly. But that was ok, as we had been invited to the meeting where our analysis was being briefed in support of the larger topic. Only, at the last moment, our meeting invite was rescinded. No seats left in the general's office. Sorry. No credit for your work, and no reality check on our crazy assumptions. But we'll make sure we throw you under the bus when this all crashes down on our heads! Ok now? Buh bye! /simmer

Of course there are consequences for evil doers such as these. These naughty agencies no longer have access to our data unless we are in the room while they present it, or better yet, while we present it for them. They also don't get the raw data charts that can be edited, but rather picture files of the charts that show exactly what we intend to portray. Where trust has been breached, it is not easily re-earned. And after being burned a time or two, having our name and reputation attached to shoddy and untruthful work, we've learned it's just easier to keep all the data under wraps and only pass out the final, vetted results. Even the potentially legitimate requests get turned down now, for the most part, simply because we don't want two different answers being computed off the same data source using different methods. Math is scary. How would you explain to a three star general that the same data generated different answers and still get him to trust you at the end of the brief? It's not easy, so we just don't do it. It is detrimental to information sharing, I agree, but an unfortunately necessary action to prevent outright fraud with our numbers.

Second: because most leaders do not understand math at a deep level, they ask for impossible analysis. Why are we still in Afghanistan after 9 years? I want the answer shown in one chart, on my desk in the morning. Thanks so much.

This is by far the more common of my two headaches. Cretins intending to misuse our work do so at their own peril, and they know it. Leaders asking for two weeks of analysis to be done in 5 hours just don't know any better. Just today I had someone ask why attrition changed from last month to this month. My e-mail reply: Why did it rain Sunday instead of Wednesday? It just did, man. I can't point to ONE reason, or even five. Numbers rarely have a big neon arrow pointing at the cause of its perturbation. Rarely is there only ONE cause! In the case I was asked about today, there were literally thousands of tiny causes, few of which are being tracked and none of which can be directly affected. Asking this question is akin to asking an artist to draw the beach down to the individual grains of sand: time consuming, and adds nothing to the overall product.

We try hard to educate people on this, we really do. But the military mentality of "complete the mission, damn the cost" gets in the way. A lot. In the face of mathematical ignorance, what are genuine reasons as to why the task cannot be completed sound like excuses for failure. As such, a lot of the time we suck it up and pull an all-nighter or four. We save our push back for the most impossiblist of impossible tasks, so that people know we mean business whenever we say no. If they could be done easily in time, and we're asked to do them in no time, we generally say yes. Crazy tasks we have undertaken that fit this description include major modifications of the software we use to project how many people will be working in the Army and Police on less than 24 hours notice, and building Power Point slides from scratch less than 10 minutes before they are to be briefed to a general officer. Tasks that were absolutely bonkers, like rebuild our main model in one day (would take AT LEAST a week) have been successfully rebuffed. Our sanity is better for it.

One thing you can say for certain about this place: you won't be bored.

*****

My next post will not be about work. I promise. In fact, I hope that my next three or four won't be about work. I'm tired of writing about the office and all that stuff, and I think I've covered it well enough for right now. I will move on to other topics. I don't know what yet, but I'll figure it out as I go. I always do.

All for this evening. Out here.