BULLETS, BEANS, AND BULLSHIT
BULLETS, BEANS, AND BULLSHIT
Bullshit is endemic to the Army. Pragmatism demands that we reject it.
"It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as of the essence of bullshit."
Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
“Continuous analysis and assessment must be done in a holistic, iterative fashion to deepen the understanding of the environment and to modify the plans and execution as necessary to reach the operational objectives. Staff and commanders must continually assess the effectiveness of activities in creating the desired effects, and adapt accordingly.”
B-GL-300-001/FP-001 Land Operations.
Armies, as a rule, are quagmires of bullshit. The Canadian Army is no exception. We accept that bullshit is an occupational hazard in the Army, but it’s a hazard that we struggle to manage and it’s one that threatens our effectiveness as a force.
In order to understand bullshit we need a taxonomy, that is, a map of bullshit and the common varieties found in the wild. Using our taxonomy, we can develop diagnostic tools to detect bullshit and expose its corrosive effects on our integrity and professional culture. I assume that bullshit is also a hazard in other environments and government departments, but since my experience is in the land force I will be focusing my attention on that.
I
The subject of bullshit entered the mainstream in 2005 when Princeton University Press issued a hardcover edition of Harry G. Frankfurt’s 1988 essay "On Bullshit.” Frankfurt doesn’t mince words: "[one] of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share." He argues that even though we treat bullshit as a lesser moral offence than lying, it’s actually more harmful to a culture of truth. I believe this wholeheartedly, for reasons which will become clear.
In Frankfurt’s view, even though a liar and a bullshitter both aim to deceive their targets, bullshitting and lying require different mental states. In order to lie, someone must believe that they know the truth and intentionally make a false account of it. For example, if you believe that today is Monday but today is in fact Tuesday, and somebody asks you what day it is, you're not a liar if you say “today is Monday.” You’re not lying because you really do believe that today is Monday, even though this belief is incorrect. In order to lie, you have to intentionally make a statement that is contrary to the truth as you understand it. In this example, you would be lying if you said “today is Tuesday” while believing that today is actually Monday. You would be accidentally correct, but you would still be lying because you are providing a false account of what you believe is true.
This means that lying actually requires a tacit respect for the truth on the part of the liar. The liar has to at least acknowledge the existence of truth in order to avoid it. To provide a false account of the truth, the liar must first believe in the truth.
The bullshitter, by contrast, does not operate under this constraint. Bullshit according to Frankfurt is speech without any regard for the truth whatsoever. To Frankfurt, "[the bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is speech that is disconnected from a concern for truth. The bullshitter will say anything if it helps them achieve their desired ends.
Frankfurt also touches on "bull" and "bull sessions” which are distinct but adjacent terms to bullshit. Bull sessions are conversations where everyone is bullshitting and everyone knows it. In a bull session, the participants are in on the joke and nobody is misrepresenting themselves as telling the truth. “Shooting the bull”provides plausible deniability for risky speech. In a bull session, participants are free to express borderline opinions in a low-consequence environment. We also call this “locker room talk.” It used to be the primary form of talk in the mess. Bull sessions actually serves a useful purpose; they allow people to establish where the boundaries of acceptable speech are and learn the unwritten rules that govern social relations without risking permanent harm to their reputation. Back in the day, you would hear a lot of bull sessions in office bullpens, but our ongoing culture change efforts have put a damper on it. Exploring this further would require its own post.
Let’s move on to the topic of “bull”, which is discussed at length by British psychologist Norman F. Dixon, author of On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon beat Frankfurt to the punch by publishing his own theory of bullshit in 1976, twelve years before “On Bullshit.” Dixon is a Freudian psychologist writing in the 1970s, so I am skeptical of the scientific merit of his book. Nonetheless, he provides an interesting outsider’s perspective of British military culture from the Crimean War up to the Second World War and how that culture enabled terrible officers while punishing competent ones (spoiler: aristocrats and nepotism are bad for meritocracy).
There is an entire chapter of the book about bullshit as a contributing factor to military incompetence. Dixon attributes the origin of the word "bullshit" to Australian soldiers, who in 1916 "were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British Army that they felt moved to give it a label." His theory of the Australian origin of bullshit is supported by Australian philosopher David Stove, who believed that it's a signature national expression.
Dixon uses bull and bullshit interchangeably to mean "ritualistic observance of the dominance and submission relationships of the military hierarchy, extreme orderliness, and a preoccupation with outward appearance." Like I said, he’s a Freudian. Still, I think that he’s on to something here. Things like obsessive cleaning and parade square drill are rituals which help leaders feel like they’re in control of the environment, even (especially) when they’re not. Lieutenant General Harold “Hal” Moore (who was definitely not incompetent) provides a historical example: as a Lieutenant-Colonel in command of an air assault battalion in Vietnam, he ordered his soldiers to shave every day, even while on patrol in jungle. Ostensibly, the soldiers had to shave every day for hygiene, but Moore was really enforcing daily shaves to maintain a spirit of uncompromising discipline in his unit.
Frankfurt provides a definition of bull that is compatible with Dixon’s. He defines bull as an activity which doesn't actually serve to accomplish it’s stated aim or justification. Scraping your face in the jungle isn’t actually sanitary, but submitting to the ritual signals obedience. Consider a situtation familiar to every Canadian soldier: it’s 1530h on a Friday and you can’t turn your guns into the vault until you wipe off all the lubricant and scrape the bolts, thereby damaging them. This is bullshit.
The most common bullshit of this type used to be things like shaving every day, shining combat boots to a high gloss, and painting the rocks outside of headquarters. In these heady days of beards, brown boots, and bongs, that bullshit has been mostly replaced by mandatory online courses (more on this later). The non-military equivalent of bull is “theatre”: security theatre and hygiene theatre. Theatre provides the illusion of safety and control when the public feels threatened by a spectre of something sinister, like terrorists and COVID.
Canadian political philosopher G. A. Cohen added some depth to the discourse when he responded to Frankfurt in "Deeper into Bullshit." Cohen wasn't satisfied that Frankfurt had explored full range of bullshit as a social phenomenon. Frankfurt anchors his definition of bullshit in the intention or mental state of the speaker (the bullshitter) whose lack of concern for truth is what makes their statements bullshit. Cohen responds to this by pointing out that there are many people who honestly profess their bullshit beliefs. Reading this brought me back to my undergrad days. I had a TA in a 300-level philosophy course who claimed that he doubted his own existence. Personally, I wondered whether he would still doubt his own existence if I punched him in the balls for spewing such performative bullshit in class. So I think that Cohen makes a good point: there are bullshitters who honestly believe their own bullshit.
Cohen’s argument is squarely aimed at a certain style of academic writing, which he calls "unclarifiable unclarity." These are intentionally vague statements which cannot be clarified without distorting their apparent meaning or dropping the veil of profundity altogether. If you want an example, you can try reading Hegel or a postmodernist philosopher, or just save yourself the effort and click on this postmodern bullshit generator (trust me, it’s indistinguishable from the real thing). Pennycook et al. label statements of this type as "pseudo-profound bullshit". Hilariously, they ran a series of experiments to see if test subjects would find the appearance of profound truth in both real and algorithmically-generated Deepak Chopra tweets. The result, disappointingly, was yes.
Sidebar. The Army equivalent of Deepak Chopra’s tweets are officers who uncritically stan the manoeuvrist approach. Anytime I hear someone trying to explain how the manoeuvrist approach is the culmination of warfare like they’re some kind of camo-clad Francis Fukayama, it’s almost always pseudo-profound bullshit. And yes, I have read B-GL-300-001/FP 001 Land Operations. If somebody can explain in the comments how shaping the enemy’s understanding, attacking their will, and shattering their cohesion are things only the manoeuvrist approach can accomlish, then I’m all ears. If you hate yourself, you can waste 40 minutes of your life listening to a USMC Major go on about how the manoeuvrist approach isn’t a framework, it’s a lifestyle. If you’re one of these true-believer manoeuvristes then you should know that the rest of us are getting sick of your bullshit.
Cohen adds a fourth type of bullshit to our taxonomy: "irretrievably speculative comment." Basically, when someone is arguing for a proposition which they have no way of knowing is true or false, or they put forward an argument that's completely unsupported by readily available evidence, then that argument is bullshit.
Years ago I talking to an infantry Major who was convinced that teaching urban operations was a waste of time. He thought that the Army, per his interpretation of the manoeuvrist approach, could simply choose to bypass cities in pursuit of the mythical decisive engagement. He told me that in the future, urban operations would only be conducted by Special Operations Forces. This was obviously bullshit, even before Russia renewed its invasion of Ukraine last year. He either ignored or was ignorant of the multiple examples from recent history where quantitatively weaker adversaries forced stronger armies to fight in cities because the urban environment negates manoeuvrist advantage.
Still with me? So far we've identified and defined four types of bullshit (BS):
BS1 (Frankfurt): propositions made without concern for truth.
BS2 (Dixon): ritualistic activity which doesn't serve its stated aim or justification.
BS3 (Cohen/Pennycook): unclarifiable unclarity aka pseudo-profound bullshit.
BS4 (Cohen): speculation beyond what's reasonably permitted by the evidence.
The common denominator of all four types of bullshit is their disconnection from reality. Bullshit statements don't enhance our understanding and bullshit activity doesn’t get us any closer to achieving our goals in the real world. Bullshit doesn't necessarily move us further away from truth, like lies do, but it certainly doesn't get us any closer to it either. Essentially, bullshit lowers the signal-to-noise ratio of discourse.
II
Can we test for bullshit? Many people believe that they are naturally good at detecting bullshit, that they can "smell" it and catch the bullshitter in the act, proudly pronouncing "don't bullshit me!" Pennycook et al. found that some people are in fact more duped by pseudo-profound bullshit than others. This strikes me as self-evident. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a masterpiece on why people believe bullshit, even in the face of contradicting evidence. It’s clear that to a greater-or-lesser extent we're all susceptible to bullshit. We ought to have a simple, easy to teach diagnostic tool which will help us raise our mental defences against it.
Sidebar 2. Some ideas sound like bullshit but are actually worth exploring in depth. This usually happens when someone cannot explain a complicated or esoteric idea in a way that makes it sound credible. apxhard wrote a good post about this.
David Stove isn't much help here. He seems to think that bullshit is like porn; you just know it when you see it. Cohen does a little better. He describes a BS3 litmus test invented by his friend and fellow academic Arthur J. Brown: if you can add or subtract a negation (-) from any line in the text and it makes no difference to the clarity of the text, then it's BS3. This is an important diagnostic tool in academia (just ask Alan Sokal, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose), but I doubt that it would helpful in the field.
I propose a second test for bullshit that is rooted in pragmatism, since military decision makers are (or ought to be) pragmatic. We value truth instrumentally because knowing the facts is necessary for maintaining situational awareness and achieving our aims. In essence, propositions are true inasmuch as they enhance our understanding and enable us to accomplish our objectives. This is aligned with Frankfurt's common-sense vision of truth, which he outlines in On Truth, the lesser-known sequel to On Bullshit (no one can accuse Frankfurt of unclarifiable unclarity in his titles).
The pragmatic test of bullshit is simple. Ask yourself "does this statement bring clarity to a known fact or raise a new fact which enhances my understanding of the situation?" If the answer is yes, then this statement is useful. If the answer is no, then the statement is probably bullshit.
Imagine that you're a staff drone deep in the bowels of an Ottawa depression factory. You're worried that it might be raining outside and your want to stay dry when you leave the office to return to your charging port. You ask your colleague if he thinks you should put on a rain jacket. He replies “have you considered that the average annual precipitation in Singapore is 2497 mm per year? If you were in Singapore you would want a rain jacket.” Technically this statement isn't false and your colleague isn't lying, but as a proposition it's completely useless to you. Your colleague hasn't done anything to enhance your ability to solve the problem. They haven’t deceived you, but they wasted your time and you're no closer to the truth than you were before. If you think this example is contrived, then consider yourself blessed to have been spared from the circle of Hell that is Army capability development.1
Since bullshitters aren’t constrained by a concern for the facts, there’s an asymettric level of effort between the bullshitter and the fact-checker. It’s so much easier to bullshit than it is to cultivate deep knowledge and subject matter expertise. The next time you're in a meeting, briefing, or browsing the r/CanadianForces subreddit, try applying the pragmatic test to the discourse. You might be surprised (or dismayed) by how many people are simply talking to be heard, without adding anything of substance. These are low-entropy bullshitters: they talk a lot but say very little.
III
By now you may be wondering what my beef is with bullshit. After all, exposure to bullshit is an unavoidable hazard of Army life and we're all guilty of bullshitting at some point. Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is inevitable anytime a person has to present themselves as an authority on a topic that they don't know much about. This is known as the "fake it 'till you make it" approach. My experience with the training system leads me to believe that this is true.
So if exposure to bullshit is inevitable then what's the big deal? In order to understand the threat that bullshit poses to the Army, you must first understand the effect that bullshit has on our time and attention.
Time management is a zero-sum game because time is a resource that you can never get more of. Sure, your deadline can be extended, but that doesn't decrease the amount of time you have to sink into the activity. Time spent on one activity is time which is not being spent on another (hopefully less important) activity.
Attention is also zero-sum. In his book on mental training, The Rock Warrior’s Way, climbing coach (and US Army veteran) Arno Ilgner wrote that "[attention] is awareness heightened and focused, the intentional directing of awareness... The Rock Warrior's Way boils down to attention and what you do with it."
Every person has a limited attention span and and research indicates that most people can only focus their active attention on one thing at a time. Humans are not very good at multitasking, so trying to click through a slide deck on one monitor while typing a briefing note in the other means that you’re neither learning effectively nor producing good staff work. Your mind can "automate" certain routine tasks, which is why you can drive and hold a conversation at the same time, but your attention is being split, not doubled.
BS2 consumes time and attention which could be spent on useful activity. BS1, BS3, and BS4 waste time and attention as they force another go-round on the carousel of bullshit. Bullshit is the rock of Sisyphus for staff everywhere. Annual briefings? Bullshit. Meetings that could have been emails? Bullshit. Box-ticking? Bullshit.
IV
By now every member of the CAF will be familiar with the ever-expanding list of mandatory online courses that simply must be completed by everyone for… reasons. In 2021, my team tallied the number of hours required per person to complete their minimum number of mandatory online courses. We used the official time estimates from DND's Dispersed Learning Network. The time required for the junior officers? 51 hours. Those 51 hours I spent learning about such critical issues as "radio frequency safety awareness" consumed time and attention that could have been dedicated to, you know, doing my job.
Relatively speaking, I didn't even have it that bad. My Commanding Officer griped in a unit townhall that the average amount of mandatory online learning for senior supervisors had metastasized to ~120 hours. That's the equivalent of fifteen business days of doing nothing but clicking through slides to get a tick in the box. Yet somehow we never have enough time to train basic soldier skills.
Since time and attention are zero-sum, troops either care enough about the course material to pay close attention at the expense of their other duties, or they choose to do what I'm sure >90% of the CAF does and click through the slides as fast as they can to get it over with. At the end of the day, your file will look the same whether you paid close attention to every slide or attempted to set a new speedrun record on GBA+.
Since the automated delivery model for these courses precludes testing that isn’t multiple choice, online exam answer keys proliferate through peer networks. There is no measure of performance for these online courses, they're pass-fail. Therefore, the completion rates tell us nothing about how much of the material the our members retain five minutes they close their browser windows. The numbers are complete bullshit.
If you think that I'm overstating the problem, consider two examples from my own experience. Both of these occured within the past few years, but not at my current posting. A hotshot Major was being posted in to our unit from Ottawa. He paused while touring the office to ask if the unit had a Gender Advisor. Someone mentioned that there was a Captain who had taken the NATO Gender Advisor online course, to which he responded “thank fuck, hopefully they can explain how this GBA+ thing is supposed to work.” Apparently his section in NDHQ had been copy-pasting a boilerplate directive into their orders which stressed that commanders at all levels must apply GBA+. The problem was that they didn’t know what GBA+ consisted of or how to apply it. They were bullshitters, type BS1. The GBA+ course is still considered to be the sine qua non of theatre in the Army, type BS2.
The second incident involved fake expertise and real bullets. There are certain tests of basic skills which service members have to complete every year. These are called Individual Battle Task Standards, or IBTS.
This week was the unit IBTS week, which meant doing Personal Weapon Tests in the simulator and on a live range. During the rifle PWT 3, a staff officer (from the combat arms) kept hitting the berm instead of their target. Attempts to troubleshoot the problem abruptly failed when the optical sight fell off their rifle as they moved between firing points. It didn’t really matter anyway, because only two people out of a dozen on that serial achieved the passing score. Regardless, everyone was recorded as having completed their IBTS for the year. If those boxes didn’t get checked then more training would be required, which would steal precious time and attention away from more important tasks. Technically everyone had "completed" their IBTS, but only slim a minority had actually demonstrated basic proficiency with their weapons. The IBTS stats we reported were bullshit.
Everyone knew that the the numbers were bullshit - our higher headquarteres almost certainly suspected as much - but it didn't matter. What actually mattered is that we had ticked our box so that higher could tick their box and nobody got in trouble. Helping buddies on the range with a "5.56 pencil" is SOP across the Army because it's impossible to become a proficient shooter when the only range practise you get is 69 rounds for PWT 3 once a year.
PWT scores aren't important. I mean, they are important in the sense that they measure of how well soldiers can handle their service weapons, but the scores aren’t actually important in the grand scheme of things. The scores aren't entered into a system of record so we can’t use them for accountability or analytics. If you want a Marksman Badge on your uniform, just go Clothing Stores and ask for one. They gave me one no questions asked. What's actually important to the broader organisation is the completion rate. That’s why units bullshit their numbers.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that staff officers failing a PWT is a critical vulnerability at the formation level, but that’s not the point. The point is that dishonesty is so normalized that eyebrows would be raised if we didn’t bullshit the numbers. We’ve become desensitized to dishonesty and numb to truth.
The same pattern of bullshit is repeated on career courses and during Field Training Exercises. Just ask anybody who’s supported a Combat Team Commander's Course or gone through Exercise MAPLE RESOLVE. The enemy force is handicapped and their actions are scripted. Approving nods are given to defences on forward slopes that would be crushed by enemy artillery. Attacks that would have been bloody disasters in real life are allowed to succeed.
Bullshit like this breeds cynicism and that cynicism breeds contempt. In an all-volunteer force, the social contract between leaders and followers is a sacred bond of trust. Our soldiers agree to stake their lives on our decisions, but they do so contingently. Soldiers must trust that their leaders will not spend their lives carelessly through a reckless disregard for reality.
Recall the Major from earlier who thought that urban warfare training was wasted on the regular Army. That Major, at one point, was the Chief Instructor of a school which formed part of the Combat Training Centre (I won’t specify which one). To say that my trust in the institution was damaged following that conversation would be an understatement.
V
Let’s talk like soldiers for a moment.
See, you can bullshit your boss but you can't bullshit physics. It is written that when the infantry fuck up the infantry die, but when the artillery fuck up the infantry die. The moral is that “fake it ‘till you make it” only goes so far. Eventually you will hit hard material limits. Phillip K. Dick got it right: reality is what persists after you stop believing in it.
Take two minutes and watch this video of Ukrainian drones dropping grenades on Russian soldiers. Ask yourself how they got themselves into such compromised positions. Do you think their chain of command had a firm grip on reality?
When I first saw that video I thought of an RCAF Captain who, during their pre-deployment combat first aid course, asked the instructor to go easy on them because it was "unfair" to hold them to "the Army standard." I guess the Captain thought that their blue t-shirt would grant them an extra minute of blood if their leg was blown off in a rocket attack.
You can bullshit your boss but you can't bullshit incoming fire. Incoming fire will not heed your bullshit beliefs because incoming fire is real.
Blood is the price of bullshit.
Edit 20 Aug 2023: this sentence previously referenced materiel management, but capability development is the more correct term.