Sometimes Right

This is the blog of Jerry Brito. Mostly links to interesting articles with a little bit of commentary. Updated most weekdays.

Sometimes Right

Politics & Law

How Iran Changed War by Michael C. Horowitz at Foreign Affairs

In war, it might seem as if wealthy states always benefit from new military capabilities. But the reality is more complicated. If a new system is expensive, it indeed favors rich incumbents. But if it is cheap and demands large organizational changes to adopt, other countries can take advantage just as quickly—if not faster. In fact, the most powerful militaries in the world often struggle in the face of required disruptive organizational change, as their prior success has created bureaucracies and organizational biases that make adaption harder. As a result, they have a hard time integrating new capabilities that cannot be plugged into their existing structures.

Precise mass is just such a capability. The most conventionally powerful militaries are organized around small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons and platforms such as Tomahawk missiles and F-35s. Their units train and plan around these systems. They thus cannot easily adjust to precise mass capabilities, which require different kinds of training and entirely new conceptions of how to fight. Exquisite systems, for instance, are scarce, so units must take great care not to waste systems and to minimize the risk of destruction. With precise mass, by contrast, units are supposed to move quickly and not make the perfect the enemy of the good. This helps explain why the United States has struggled to adapt to precise mass—even though the country invented precision guidance and boasts the best military in the world.

“Precise mass” weapons are low-cost, technologically advanced offensive systems that combine high-accuracy guidance with cheap, scalable manufacturing to overwhelm adversaries with volume. This is a good overview of the challenge the U.S. faces given the advent of these weapons. But I’m shocked (not shocked?) that the article treats it completely as a bureaucratic, organizational, and military-cultural issue. It doesn’t once mention the incentives of the producers and dependents of the “exquisite” and incredibly expensive weapons platforms. |

How Big Tobacco flooded the FDA with public comments to kill a menthol cigarette ban by Jason McLure at STAT

After the FDA drafted language to outlaw the manufacture of the mint-flavored cigarettes in 2022, it asked for public comments — and was hit with an avalanche of 175,000 messages over three months. …

Such campaigns usually have little effect on rulemaking because agencies typically consider the substance of comments rather than the volume, said Steven Balla, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University. “You can imagine a case where there are a million ‘I hate this rule’ comments,” Balla said. “But the agency’s response will mostly be to the handful that are substantive.”

What’s novel about the menthol campaign is that the tactic seems to have worked.

In this case, the Biden administration was looking for an excuse to withdraw the rulemaking, which had upset the black base it needed in the upcoming election, but that just proves the strategy is worth the shot. And it seems to me that with AI, it should be relatively easy for interest groups to help citizens draft completely unique, well-argued, and (most importantly) substantive letters. Of course, on the receiving end, the agencies will want to use AI to triage a massive influx. I wonder if courts would let them since it wouldn’t be quite the same thing as using computers to count identical form letters. |