Emperor Tiberius Consulting

what the devil whispers in my ear when I ask for reform

To the eye-rolling and irritation to some, perhaps many, regularly over the years I have in one way or another called for:

• Root and branch replacement of our accretion-encumbered acquisition system.

• Repeal and replacement of Goldwater-Nichols.

• COCOM reform.

• …and as always, Joint delenda est.

Is that wise?

If my magic wand worked, would things really get better?

The dysfunction we all see is, in my opinion, a process problem. Bad, archaic, and no longer fit for purpose processes and concepts. What if I have 180-degree lockoff here?

As it is with any system built from the crooked timber of humanity, everything is warped from the start. The key is how warped, and does the warping increase over time?

My view above is actually the optimist point of view.

In times of worry and wonder, it is best to look back to the great minds of history and what they may be able to help us understand our present.

What if you live in a culture, a civil society, that itself has become so warped in morals, ethics, and contempt for the law that it isn’t the imperfect systems and structures that are the problem - but the fact that you can not fill it with good people who will make it work?

Well, that’s depressing…and that is when I found something a couple of thousand years old - in its source - to ponder today.

In Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, published by Franz Steiner Verlag you can find this jewel from Edward Champlin’s, Tiberius the Wise.

Yes, that Tiberius, the stepson of Augustus who was followed by Caligula. As popular history is generally trash, I like this counterpoint on the reputation of Tiberius on wiki;

Despite the overwhelmingly negative characterisation left by Roman historians, Tiberius left the imperial treasury with nearly 3 billion sesterces upon his death. Rather than embark on costly campaigns of conquest, he chose to strengthen the existing empire by building additional bases, using diplomacy as well as military threats, and generally refraining from getting drawn into petty squabbles between competing frontier tyrants. The result was a stronger, more consolidated empire, ensuring the imperial institutions introduced by his adoptive father would remain for centuries to come.

What does Tiberius have to say that could possibly inform thinking about acquisition reform?

At Champlin’s work above, we have this extended quote;

In his Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus discussed Tiberius' legendary procrastination in receiving embassies, replacing governors, and conducting trials. When the princeps' friends questioned his slowness, he replied, in the matter of governors, that those who stayed in their provinces for short terms worked hard at extortion from the provincials, but those who remained for a long time grew sated with their profits:

He told them this fable by way of illustration. Once a man lay wounded, and a swarm of flies hovered about his wounds. A passer-by took pity on his evil plight and, in the belief that he did not raise a hand because he could not, was about to step up and shoo them off. The wounded man, however, begged him to think no more of doing anything about it. At this the man spoke up and asked him why he was not interested in escaping from his wretched condition. "Why," said he, "you would put me in a worse position if you drove them off. For since these flies have already had their fill of blood, they no longer feel such a pressing need to annoy me but are in some measure slack. But if others were to come with a fresh appetite, they would take over my now weakened body and that would be the death of me."

He too, he said, for the same reason took the precaution of not dispatching governors continually to the subject-peoples who had been brought to ruin by so many thieves; for the governors would harry them utterly like flies.

Human nature is what it is. As we discussed on yesterday’s Midrats, ethics matter. You can pass all the laws, “modernize” all the bureaucracies, but what if you cannot find people of proper character to run them?

…about the rapacity of lupine governors from an astute barbarian who had surrendered to him some years before. He asked why the man's newly conquered people had rebelled and fought against the Romans for so long, and the barbarian replied, recalling yet another old proverb, "You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians of your flocks, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves."

Anyone who makes wholesale changes will not be a popular person in Washington DC either. Whoever makes the changes will have to wield the sword that reduces the size of the bureaucracy. The blob will move to destroy such a person.

Where do you find such people?

Sometimes people criticized his actions, not realizing that they were for the common good. To these he replied mildly with another proverb, taken from the most famous half line in Latin popular drama, oderint dum metuant, "Let them hate me so long as they fear me." The melodramatic words of a stage tyrant he cleverly molded into a virtuous new form: oderint dum probent, something like "Let them hate me so long as they approve of my deeds."

Well, this is a hell of a way to start the week, but here we are.

I would also be remiss if I did not include a quote from another great man that Gray Conolly likes to use now and then.