7 ideas, 2 stories and a poem – selected by Tom OConnor
skmoltom2@aol.com
“The difference between a dream and a goal is a deadline.” Napoleon Hill
Facebook and Dignity Develop success from failures. stepping-stones to success.
Lag B’Omer & Gratitude People will generally judge you by your actions, Love is that condition in which The Magic Of Love Life has many twists and turns and sometimes what looks like a very bad day is just clearing the way for good things to come. Champions keep playing until they get it right. The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist trims the sails, tacks into the wind … and sails on. If you believe in yourself and have courage, determination, dedication, and
– Vince Lombardi …with a few edits
and undaunted.
7 ideas and two articles
Tom OConnor
skmoltom2@aol.com
“Our attitudes control our lives.
Attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad.
It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.”
~ Tom Blandi
…if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose — somehow we win out.”
~ Ronald Reagan
“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life;
not so much by what happens to you as by the way you look at what happens.”
~ John Homer Miller …with a few edits
“Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible for your life.”
~ Les Brown
Why is Israel So Happy?
The Jewish state ranked 14th on global Happiness Report. What’s its secret?
Israel ranked 14th in the United Nations’ first World Happiness Report. The list is headed by Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands, the paradises of political correctness, welfare, anti-war, ultra-liberal and anti-nationalistic feelings, beacons which, according to the Global Peace Index, topped the list of the most “peaceful” places in the world.
So how can we explain the happiness of Israel, the only civilized country under mortal danger, the only nation without recognized borders and globally selected to be an emblem of evil?
To people who don’t live in Israel, this is a mystery. Many Israelis probably can’t figure it out, either. How is it possible that a population living under a perpetual emotional strain and ghettoizing itself behind new Maginot lines is so happy?
How can the Jews be happy when Iran is going nuclear and threatening to wipe them off the map? How can they be happy when the Arabs are firing rockets every day at civilians in Ashkelon, Beersheba, Ashdod and Sderot? What are the sources of the happiness of the only UN member condemned to death and boycotted all over the world?
Israel is much happier than all the European countries that experienced their last war six decades ago. The Jewish state’s population exceeds 7.5 million, nine times that of 1948, the year of the state’s creation. Israelis are happy because they succeeded demographically; considering the Diaspora’s low birth rates and high assimilation rates, it may not be long before most of the world’s Jews will be Israelis.
Despite Jewish heroism and Israeli collectivism giving way to Western individualism, self-criticism and frivolous hedonism, Israeli happiness is much more than the American dream of a large house and a nice car. It lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning, “a nation like all other nations” but also “a light unto the nations.”
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Related Video: Israel: Defying the Odds
Belief in God
Israelis, which have one of the longest life expectancies of any nation in the world, are happy because their country has a history of scintillating enlightenment, with the highest production of scientific publications per capita in the world, more museums per capita and the highest worldwide publication of new books. In a war-ravaged country like Israel, the past few years saw five Israeli Nobel Prize winners.
Another reason is economic success. No other industrialized country does it better, especially for a nation that doesn’t have natural resources and has a population roughly half of Belgium’s. Israel’s high-tech industry is flourishing, making the country known as “start-up nation.”
While Israel’s social fabric is deeply divided between ultra-Orthodox Jews and “Hellenistic” Israelis, nationalists and leftists, two-thirds of Israelis believe in God, therefore maintaining the hope and feeling that there is higher meaning and purpose to their lives. There is also the attachment to the Jewish land, while love for one’s land is a nationalistic taboo in the West.
Overall, Israel’s population is very resilient. A new governmental study just found that Intifada-era violence did nothing to affect Israel’s national morale. Israelis are also happy because they know that Dimona and the IDF are there to protect them, even if the army lost some of its famous deterrence.
Finally, there is the most important reason why Israeli happiness is an enchanting and heartening mystery for all free men. When comparing the fertility rate to the suicide rate, one can see the proportion of people who choose to create new life against the proportion who choose to destroy their own. This is why the Jews will ultimately win a centennial war against an enemy ready to sacrifice all of its children in order to throw all Israelis into the sea.
In Israel, the celebrations of life are far more numerous than the memories of death. That’s Israel’s secret for happiness: it’s a lighthouse of life on the border between survival and destruction. Ultimately, life will prevail over death.
This article originally appeared on ynetnews.com
The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part.
The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well. — Baron de Coubertin, The Olympic Creed
Never Fight a Land War in Asia
March 1, 2011 |
Stratfor
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last year that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?
The Hindrances of Overseas Wars
Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.
When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of material, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.
Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.
The United States compensates with technology, from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.
The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war. Having identified the enemy, the United States can overwhelm it with firepower. The problem the United States has is finding the enemy and distinguishing it from the general population. As a result, the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with. The enemy can then control the tempo of operations by declining combat where it is at a disadvantage and initiating combat when it chooses.
The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited as a model of U.S. forces defeating and pacifying an opposing nation. But the Germans were not defeated primarily by U.S. ground troops. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines. And, of course, Britain and numerous other countries were involved. It is doubtful that the Germans would have capitulated to the Americans alone. The force the United States deployed was insufficient to defeat Germany. The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians. They weren’t going to resist them. As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender. It was not land power that prevented resistance but air and sea power, plus a political compromise by MacArthur in retaining and using the emperor. Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly. Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.
The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country. The force available for pacification is much smaller than needed because the force the United States can deploy demographically without committing to total war is simply too small to do the job — and the size needed to do the job is unknown.
U.S. Global Interests
The deeper problem is this: The United States has global interests. While the Soviet Union was the primary focus of the United States during the Cold War, no power threatens to dominate Eurasia now, and therefore no threat justifies the singular focus of the United States. In time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States must still retain a strategic reserve for other unanticipated contingencies. This further reduces the available force for combat.
Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home. The Soviets and the Nazis, neither noted for gentleness, were unable to destroy the partisans behind German lines or the Yugoslav resistance, in spite of brutal tactics. The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.
Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II. In each case it is obvious: for political reasons. In Korea and Vietnam, it was to demonstrate to doubting allies that the United States had the will to resist the Soviets. In Afghanistan, it was to uproot al Qaeda. In Iraq, the reasons are murkier, more complex and less convincing, but the United States ultimately went in, in my opinion, to convince the Islamic world of American will.
The United States has tried to shape events in the Eastern Hemisphere by the direct application of land power. In Korea and Vietnam, it was trying to demonstrate resolve against Soviet and Chinese power. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was trying to shape the politics of the Muslim world. The goal was understandable but the amount of ground force available was not. In Korea, it resulted in stalemate; in Vietnam, defeat. We await the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, but given Gates’ statement, the situation for the United States is not necessarily hopeful.
In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable. At the same time, there were political interests in each. Having engaged, simply leaving did not seem an option. Therefore, Korea turned into an extended presence in a near-combat posture, Vietnam ended in defeat for the American side, and Iraq and Afghanistan have turned, for the time being, into an uncertain muddle that no reasonable person expects to end with the declared goals of a freed and democratic pair of countries.
Problems of Strategy
There are two problems with American strategy. The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission. This is not a question so much of the force as it is of the mission. The use of military force requires clarity of purpose; otherwise, a coherent strategy cannot emerge. Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory. Given the limited availability of ground combat forces, defensive missions allow the enemy’s level of effort to determine the size of the force inserted, and if the force is insufficient to achieve the mission, the result is indefinite deployment of scarce forces.
Then there are missions with clear goals initially but without an understanding of how to deal with Act II. Iraq suffered from an offensive intention ill suited to the enemy’s response. Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale. The same was true in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency is occupation warfare. It is the need to render a population — rather than an army — unwilling and incapable of resisting. It requires vast resources and large numbers of troops that outstrip the interest. Low-cost counter-insurgency with insufficient forces will always fail. Since the United States uses limited forces because it has to, counterinsurgency is the most dangerous kind of war for the United States. The idea has always been that the people prefer the U.S. occupation to the threats posed by their fellow countrymen and that the United States can protect those who genuinely do prefer the former. That may be the idea, but there is never enough U.S. force available.
Another model for dealing with the problem of shaping political realities can be seen in the Iran-Iraq war. In that war, the United States allowed the mutual distrust of the two countries to eliminate the threats posed by both. When the Iraqis responded by invading Kuwait, the United States responded with a massive counter with very limited ends — the reconquest of Kuwait and the withdrawal of forces. It was a land war in Asia designed to defeat a known and finite enemy army without any attempt at occupation.
The problem with all four wars is that they were not wars in a conventional sense and did not use the military as militaries are supposed to be used. The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak. The problem for the United States is that such an army must occupy a country for a long time, and the U.S. military simply lacks the ground forces needed to occupy countries and still be available to deal with other threats.
By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end? You then wind up with a political problem internationally — having engaged in the war, you have allies inside and outside of the country that have fought with you and taken risks with you. Withdrawal leaves them exposed, and potential allies will be cautious in joining with you in another war. The political costs spiral and the decision to disengage is postponed. The United States winds up in the worst of all worlds. It terminates not on its own but when its position becomes untenable, as in Vietnam. This pyramids the political costs dramatically.
Wars need to be fought with ends that can be achieved by the forces available. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient. When you understand the foundations of American military capability and its limits in Eurasia, Gates’ view on war in the Eastern Hemisphere is far more sound than Rumsfeld’s.
The Diplomatic Alternative
The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.
Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.
This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.
Read more: Never Fight a Land War in Asia | Stratfor
Effort and courage are good but one also needs purpose and direction. ~John F. Kennedy …with a few edits
– Vince Lombardi
A story and 8 ideas
Collected by
skmoltom2@aol.com
“At twenty years of age stronger will reigns; at thirty, brighter wit;
and at forty, better judgment.”
“Motivation is like food for the brain.
“What is the recipe for successful achievement? To my mind there are just four essential ingredients:
4. be a member of the team.”
“Before going to bed every night, tear a page from the calendar, and remark, “there goes another day of my life, never to return, and you will become more aware of the value of time.”
“Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.”
“Your goals, minus your doubts, equals your reality.”
If you believe in yourself and have courage, determination, dedication, – Vince Lombardi …with a few edits
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Mediation for Railroad Support
Along with several railroad Presidents, the President of NITL and the Chairman of the STB, Tom O’Connor is quoted in this Traffic World article, advocating railroad support for mediation by the Surface Transportation Board.
New NS chief to face challenges
By John Gallagher
Traffic World
October 7, 2005
When Norfolk Southern recently named its Atlanta office building after Chairman, President and CEO David Goode, it marked a turning point for an old industry whose newest leaders will face challenges not seen in 50 years, according to this report by Traffic World magazine.
Goode, who took the NS reins in 1992, led the railroad through a period of economic downturns that required the railroad to ratchet back its rate of investment to meet lackluster demand. But Charles “Wick” Moorman, 52, who will take over as Goode’s successor Nov. 1, will be trying to satisfy demand for space on his system that is so high that NS and the rest of the rail industry can use price to adjust the amount of business they take on.
“For railroad CEOs in the past, the principal question was how to get more business on their systems,” said Surface Transportation Board Chairman Roger Nober. “Now the question is how to get the most valuable business on the railroad while maintaining the emphasis on service, costs, inventory and supply.”
Moorman and other members of the industry’s “new guard” — namely Union Pacific Railroad President Jim Young, 52, who’s expected to succeed Chairman Dick Davidson; Mike Ward, 55, who rose quickly through the ranks at CSX to become chairman in 2003, and BNSF Railway’s Matt Rose, who at 46 is the youngest railroad chairman — are facing an industry short on capacity while being pushed to load increasing amounts of freight.
Deregulation of the rail industry has been a significant factor in forming today’s rail landscape. After 25 years of declining rates and railroads struggling to generate enough revenue to justify more investment, it now seems most railroads will make enough money this year to become “revenue adequate” in the eyes of the STB. They’re burgeoning on a level of profitability not seen in decades.
“The biggest change is that the railroads are faced with traffic growth, which hasn’t been an industry driver for several generations,” said Henry Posner III, chairman of Railroad Development Corp., a Pittsburgh-based short line operating company. “It takes a different type of manager to deal with that, or at least a focus on different skills than in the past.”
Posner says the railroads’ focus has been shifting from the operations side of the business to sales and marketing — “from cost control to the proper allocation of capacity coupled with selective investment in new capacity,” he says.
“This has been underway for a long time, but the pace has accelerated dramatically in view of the capacity constraints in the last half decide. Rail executives now need a combination of marketing and financial skills, because they have two choices: ration capacity by increasing price, or invest in more capacity. Both are based on the market, not rail operations.”
Such skills have become more the norm among top rail executives — or those expected to get there. CSX’s Ward and UP’s Young both have strong financial backgrounds. BNSF’s Rose, who majored in marketing and minored in logistics, worked in the trucking industry before getting into railroads. He has led what was has been considered a progressive charge in the rail industry to accept more government money through public-private partnerships to help fund capacity expansion. Canadian Pacific Railway Chief Operating Officer Fred Green, considered by many to be the successor to CP President and CEO Rob Ritchie, has presided over both sales and marketing.
Like UP’s Davidson, Canadian National Railway President and CEO Hunter Harrison spent the early part of his career as a brakeman. But Harrison has also been an early and aggressive advocate of scheduled railroading, a concept he began rolling out on CN in 1998 which has proven critical in right-sizing rail networks to accommodate excess demand. Other railroads have since felt compelled to adopt varying levels of scheduled operating systems to adjust to the current operating environment.
NS’s Moorman, who currently serves as president, was senior vice president of corporate planning and services from 2003 to 2004. But his background before that included a strong emphasis on technology. He was president of NS’s Thoroughbred Technology and Telecommunications business from 1999 to 2004 and earlier was information technology vice president at the railroad.
Moorman will take over a railroad that generated more than $7 billion in revenue for the first time last year, and improved its operating ratio, a key measure of railroad efficiency, to 76.7 percent, the best in six years.
Last year, NS set record revenue in coal, intermodal and general merchandise. Intermodal revenue increased 24 percent on a volume increase of 17 percent or about 425,000 loads. Rail business grew 15 percent for international traffic, 21 percent in domestic, 15 percent in premium and 8 percent for Triple Crown Services, its intermodal trailer service.
“NS is a good example of a railroad with a strong culture that has historically been operations driven, but has been able to make the transition to a market-driven railroad largely without major and dramatic changes to the organization,” Posner said. “In contrast, BNSF always had been market driven, so it has been relatively easier for them to adjust to the new environment.”
Posner and others believe corporate culture plays a significant role in a company’s ability to adjust to a changing marketplace. UP, which has had a reputation in the rail industry as being slow to change, has provided evidence that the new leadership is willing to dust off that image. Earlier this year, railroads in Houston, principally UP, were assailed by city officials for trains left blocking at-grade rail crossings. In the past, railroads’ attitudes towards these issues might have been that, while such things are unfortunate, they’re part of the railroad business.
But UP management, led by Young, responded by opening a high-level dialogue with city officials that led UP to change its operational protocols in ways that have eliminated the problem.
“It was an example of UP realizing there’s value in addressing community concerns,” said a government official familiar with the situation but who declined to be identified. “That’s a positive change for the industry and one that will increasingly be required of railroad management.”
While the latest group of railroad CEOs enjoy record profits in an industry used to crying poor to Wall Street and federal regulators, their customers are finding it increasing difficult to adjust to an environment that requires being more proactive with their carriers in order to get good service.
“In the past you could leverage modes or carriers to hold down costs — those days are over,” said National Industrial Transportation League President John Ficker. “Now shippers have to work harder with their carriers to assure that the value they get for moving their goods with them is commensurate with the price they pay.”
Tom O’Connor, a principal at Snavely King, a Washington-based economic consulting firm, does not advocate increased regulation but does advocate more rail-to-rail competition that some shippers say would also lead to better service.
“Deregulation has generally performed well, and the additional freedoms the railroads have enjoyed have been helpful,” O’Connor said. “I would not advocate re-regulation of railroad pricing in general, but I do see the repeated occurrence of very aggressive pricing in situations where the railroad perceives that the shipper doesn’t have a competitive alternative.”
To help solve the problem, O’Connor says railroad management should support the STB providing mediation in rate case disputes. “I think it’s important for the new breed of railroad CEOs to recognize that there’s still a valid role for the STB to play in resolving disputes that, if left unresolved, could draw them into prolonged litigation or result in legislation that they’d find even less appealing.”
Moorman said naming a building after Goode was a “gesture of appreciation” from NS employees. “The fact is that David’s contributions will far outlive bricks and mortar,” he said. “His focus on making rail a dependable and sought-after transportation partner has helped shape Norfolk Southern and the rail industry for the new century.”
With strong evidence that infrastructure will continue to lag behind demand in the foreseeable future, the question becomes how far the railroads will be willing to go to assure that profitability remains strong while at the same time avoiding alienating their customers.
“Railroads need to behave more like 21st century service providers and less like old line utilities,” Nober said. “They will have a difficult balance to maintain: that of a private business but one that is also regulated and accountable to the public.”
(The preceding report was published by Traffic World magazine.)
October 7, 2005
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Tom O’Connor’s testimony at the STB in the Grenada Railway line abandonment case in Mississippi
Tom O’Connor’s testimony was filed on October 27, 2011 at the Surface Transportation board (STB) on the Grenada Railway line abandonment case in Mississippi; see below.
The testimony by Tom O’Connor reflects work by the Snavely King team, Kim Hillenbrand, John Legieza, Ron Bowes and our two field engineers, Chet Rhodes and Carl Rode.
