General rule: how to reinvent America’s army

The Economist. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In Asia, there's a boom in what experts call an anxiety industry. Private tutoring. More than a quarter of a billion students have a tutor. And it's a feedback loop. The more parents who hire one, the more that other parents think they must.

And Elias Khoury saw himself as a journalist, an intellectual, and a literary critic. Then he wrote a novel, Gate of the Sun, which put both him and Lebanon on the map. Our obituaries editor celebrates his life.

First up, though, from where we were at the last 20 years, where we weren't looking up at all, understanding what's the airspace picture and understanding what's flying, what's friendly, what's not. You know, it's a very— going to be a much more cluttered battlefield with all these systems up.

Randy George joined the US Army in 1988, and that was a really interesting time in the Army.

Shashank Joshi is The Economist's defense editor.

It was an Army that was recovering from the trauma of Vietnam. It had written this new concept called Air-Land Battle about how you might defeat the Soviet Union. And a few years later, it sort of got its mojo back when it defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War. That was a war in which George served as a young lieutenant.

When I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, if I looked up, you know, I knew that it was going to be our Air Force or one of our UAS. I do think that that has changed.

Today he's General George, and he is in charge of that force. He's Chief of Staff of the US Army. He's been in the job about a year or so, and I took that opportunity to chat with him recently about his ideas for how it needs to change, how he's reinventing it for a new age, and how he's making it basically a much more technological force.

And what does he think is required for that to happen?

He's got several priorities, but fundamentally it's about warfighting, which is a kind of way of saying we spent 20 years fighting insurgents in the War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, other places. This is now about preparing for a high-intensity conflict, perhaps against Russia, perhaps against China, but basically it's a state-on-state clash. And the way he put it to me is that the focus is on building what he called lethal and cohesive teams. So part of that is trimming some of the flab, for instance, that built up over those counterinsurgency years.

We've had brigades that have turned in between 500 and 700 vehicles and trailers and things like that, things that we know that we're not going to need, and it's going to give us more time to make sure that we're focused on the things that we should be focused on.

The vehicles that are left are being serviced less often, which is accepting a bit of risk, but that leaves more time and resources to train. Ammunition factories are working at full pelt, so they produced 40,000 rounds of 155mm artillery in August. That's up about a third from February, and that's expected to double by this time next year. And the Army's manpower situation is improving as well.

We've spent a lot of effort with transforming that whole organization and how we approach, how we're using more commercial off-the-shelf products, how we're picking our recruiters. And so we've made a lot of adjustments to that, how we're advertising, all of those things.

So after years of missing recruitment targets, last month the Army had a bit of good news. It exceeded its goal for the year by about 10,000 soldiers. That's a very refreshing change from the way things have gone in the past.

So is it easy to turn around an army in this way?

I think there's two big challenges, and one of them is about its focus, which is where the Army's looking. The National Defense Strategy of the United States is really explicit: China is the priority. But the Army knows that any war over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that would involve mainly air and naval forces. The Army also has to look at Europe. It has a big presence in Europe. It has big commitments to NATO. So is it going to fight Russia, or going to fight China? Because you need different types of forces for each adversary. The second challenge is technology. We have very clearly seen, Jason, we've talked a lot in fact about how the war in Ukraine is illustrating that weapons work really well until the enemy adapts things differently.

We're in— you're, you're fully aware of how much the world is changing, has changed just over the last couple of years with where commercial tech is changing.

And so a lot of things America's GPS-guided shells have been blunted by Russian jamming. We see that drones in Ukraine need their software, their sensors, their radios updated every 6 to 12 weeks just to remain effective. You know, I mean, just like your iPhone needs constant updates and things pushed to it, the same is becoming true with weapons.

And how is General George dealing with those challenges?

Well, there's a lot of ways. I think one of the interesting ones is a scheme called Transforming in Contact.

These brigades based on how the changing battlefield, and then we've handed over this structure to the units. And then we—

so they've picked 3 brigades to serve as kind of laboratories for innovation. And they've chosen these carefully. One of these brigades is in Alaska, and it's Pacific-facing for contingencies in Asia. One of them is in continental United States, and the other one is in Germany. So it's Europe-facing. And they each are receiving the newest kit, the best kit, and they test it. They test it not just on sterile exercises in big Midwestern American bases, but they test it in the field and they give feedback on what works, what doesn't. And this is a big change for how things have gone in the past, right? In the past, the Army would spell out page upon page of requirements for, we need this drone to work in -20 degrees Celsius, in 60 degrees Celsius, we need it to be able to cope with all of these situations. And it would be over-engineered, it would be gold-plated, and they would push that stuff down to every unit in the Army over a long period, 3 to 7 years. These experimental brigades, Jason, they can buy stuff quickly, they can buy stuff that suits their environment, and they can work out whether it's working or whether it needs refinement or change.

We have users, developers, and testers that are all there together, and we're spinning the wheel, I think, much, much quicker.

And so the days of basically picking one company, getting them to build something for 10 years and keeping it for another 20 years, that's over. The future The future is modular systems that can change fast.

And do you have a sense whether all of this change is working, or will we not know until a grand conflict comes?

I think the jury's out, Jason. I talk to a lot of army chiefs, military chiefs, and you hear the same buzzwords out of all of them, right? It's innovation, experimentation. We've got to procure more quickly. We've got to do spiral development, not just buying big things and leaving them. They all understand what the problem is. I'm not entirely convinced they have all cracked the solution, but I am seeing signs of change. There's an interesting instance that General George told me about where the Army needed covers for coolant pumps on Bradley armored vehicles, and it was told these are going to take 6 to 8 months. And so what they worked out is, hey, we can 3D print these parts, and instead of 6 to 8 months, they printed off 20 of these coolant pump covers in less than an hour at about 16 cents each. Which is pretty impressive, I think. Having said all of that, Jason, look, if you talk to Army insiders, they will absolutely acknowledge the procurement system, the system for buying things and fielding them, that's still broken. It's still constrained by suffocating Pentagon rules, by suffocating legislation imposed by Congress. There is still a lot of frustration.

But you got the sense from General George that he's confident the change can, will happen?

I think the big challenge is scaling it up. In the British Army, the US Army, I see these pockets of experimentation. The big concern is, can you scale this up? When I talk to soldiers in the UK and European armies and the US Army, the thing they say to me is, how is it that we are able to help Ukraine do these amazing things, build these Frankenstein systems cobbled together, building these incredibly novel naval drones, strapping We are hacking together this sort of battlefield AI, but we are unable to procure this stuff and field it in our own formations at scale at acceptable cost. And I think that that is going to be one of the key tests. When are we going to see a US Army that is a little bit more Ukrainian?

Shoshong, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Last year, Bollywood released a hit film called 12th Fail.

Ethan Wu is our Asia correspondent.

It's a somewhat sappy story of a poor farm boy, Manoj, who's bent on becoming a police civil servant in India.

Don't waste our time. Jai Hind!

But for a film that's, at the end of the day, about education and meritocracy and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, Indian schools don't end up being portrayed that positively. They are corrupt and they're rife with cheating facilitated by the very teachers that run the school. The centerpiece of the movie and where Manoj eventually finds success and love is not at school, but at a tutoring center. People may know about fast growth in private tutoring in an East Asian context. People have heard about cram centers in Korea and Hong Kong and Taiwan driving a cram culture. But what's less known is that outside of East Asia, where those coaching centers do exist with world-beating educational systems, in the rest of Asia, in poorer parts of Asia, private tutoring is on the rise too. And it's in places where the education system is neither well-funded nor functioning well.

Ethan, can you give me some details here? Where is it rising and by how much?

Well, the hard part about answering that question, Rosie, is the data is just so poor. But we've had a crack at trying to put some figures to it. And what we were able to come up with is about 258 million children in South and Southeast Asia take private tuition. If you exclude Singapore, which tends to share more similarities with East Asia. India is certainly the biggest market. There in rural areas, 31% of schoolchildren under 15 years old take private tutoring, which is an increase from 23% in 2010. And that's in rural areas. In urban areas, prevalence is even higher, and India-wide prevalence is estimated at something like 50%. So half of Indian children in school. And as you might expect, given all the student attention, the Indian tutoring industry is booming. Tax revenue from tutoring centers has more than doubled since 2019. But the phenomenon is much broader than India. By our estimation, if you take out India from the South and Southeast Asia total, you still get 131 million children that are involved in this space.

Is this a very recent rise, and why are we seeing this trend?

The rise has been accentuated in the last decade, but we are seeing a longer-term trend that's taken place over several decades, and it's driven by 3 things. First is gaps left in the formal education systems. What we've seen in poor parts of Asia is more demands on the state for educational resources. More and more children are in secondary school. Almost all children are in some form of primary school all across the world and certainly in Asia. But at the same time, resources have not kept up. Education spending as a share of GDP has been flat to down in many of the countries that we looked at. And so what you have is schools that are not always equipped to give students the tools they need to succeed in an increasingly competitive domestic economy and increasingly competitive world. So what parents do to help their children on high-stakes exams, especially for universities, is turn to tutors. The second is what I mentioned earlier, heightened social competition. Labor markets demand more skills than ever before. Things like urbanization that push people into cities create a bit of a rat race dynamic. The third factor is an arms race, and this is somewhere where East Asia and South and Southeast Asia have a lot in common. Once your neighbor's child starts taking private tutoring, if yours doesn't, yours is behind by definition. And This is why academics call private tutoring an anxiety industry. It feeds off perceptions of falling behind if you don't purchase the product, and it leads to prevalence only going in one direction, which is up.

We tend to think of more education as a good thing. So what is the problem if parents are turning to private tuition?

Right. Education is a good thing, and it's entirely natural for parents to want to get their own children ahead. There's nothing wrong in that. The problem is when you look at society-wide effects, a big rise in private tutoring can have negative impacts. We spoke with one parent who is a supervisor at a generator manufacturer in Old Delhi who pays an increase of 30% on his usual school fees for private tutoring for his two daughters. That highlights a big downside to private tutoring, which is just the expense to parents. But that's not all. The stress to children is absolutely real. In India last year, in one city alone, there were dozens of student suicides, which led at forced at least one school to install suicide-proof ceiling fans after a series of hangings. The stress has very negative impacts on students' mental health, and it also impacts more widely their sleep. Research has shown that students enrolled in private tutoring have worse sleep with implications for their health more broadly. And then there's a question as to whether private tutoring drains the public sector's ability to deliver essential educational services. This is hard to establish systematically, but some scholars have pointed to examples where schools have essentially outsourced educational functions to private tutoring. And this is especially the case when resources are scarce and governments simply can't provide those services.

Those are some pretty terrifying conclusions. Is there actually a positive impact on exam results? Do the kids learn a lot?

Right, so if the story was students are stressed and parents are paying a lot, but they're doing better on tests, then in some ways it would be a little bit easier to say, well, the downsides are tough, but education is getting what you expect from education. The problem is it's hard to establish that tutoring systematically helps students learn effectively. Mark Bray, who's the foremost scholar of Asian private tutoring, says evidence is at best mixed. And this is an assessment shared by many scholars in the field. And the problem is that we're using this term private tutoring, but what actually counts as private tutoring is incredibly diverse. It ranges from online services to in-person coaching centers to university students helping school-age children at cafes. It's far too broad to really pinned down as one particular thing. And that means it's hard to know if all the money and the attention, and frankly the stress and the lost sleep going into tutoring is really having positive impacts. I think at best we can say it's mixed.

It's famously hard to stop arms races escalating. How do we stop the tutoring arms race from continuing then?

Well, this is the problem, isn't it? In societies that have been grappling with the effects of private tutoring for decades, like South Korea, attempts to suppress the sector simply haven't worked. A senior Korean government minister told researcher that after years of personally grappling with how to regulate private tutoring, he concluded that the market was just infinitely more creative than the state. It understands parent psychologies better. It can adapt to new rulemaking. And this is the fundamental problem with punitive approaches to private tutoring like we saw in China in 2021, which instituted a massive crackdown on the sector. Demand is organic, it's strong, and it's deeply socially entrenched, whereas supply is highly adaptable and can shift to any legal regime that it needs to. And those two dynamics make it extremely hard for governments to confront tutoring head-on.

Ethan, it's great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

In Elias Khoury's most celebrated novel, The Gate of the Sun, he described a woman Um Hassan, going back to her village.

Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.

She had fled from this village when Jewish migrants moved in in 1948 as they were founding the new state of Israel. She had been in a refugee camp, but she went back and looked around the old house, the old garden, and in the end, when she plucked up courage, she let her brother knock on the door. It was opened by a dark-skinned woman who invited them in and was very welcoming and made coffee for them. And Umm Hassan noticed that even her old earthenware water jug was in its place. The woman, however, was Jewish, although she spoke Arabic, and she said that Umm Hasan could take the water jug if she wanted as a souvenir. Umm Hasan went to do that, picked it up, and then suddenly thought she would give it to her. And they both said thank you to each other. Elias Khoury hadn't witnessed this strange little scene. He had picked it up when he visited the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, two huge camps just near Beirut, where the Palestinians were gathered fairly miserably together. There were several stories, or many of this sort. A boy whose hair had turned white when he'd witnessed a massacre, and another of an old woman who had died still fretting that she'd left a pan of zucchini cooking on the stove. He gathered them all together and didn't know what to do with them until he wrote his novel, Gate of the Sun. Suddenly he was in a different place and quite an unusual place for a Lebanese, because Lebanese literature was up until then mostly a poetical one. But he felt very strongly that writers should portray the truth of the society they were in. Identity was very confused in his region. His principal novel featured a Palestinian who was pretending to be Israeli to impress girlfriends. His own identity was mixed as well. He was a Lebanese, but his mother was Christian, and his whole background culture was Islamic, so he read the Quran as well as going to church. He and his mother between them devoured The Thousand and One Nights. The Thousand and One Nights actually became the model for much of his novel writing. He loved to present the truth from multiple points of view, multiple stories, just as Scheherazade had done when she was beguiling the Sultan. Not to kill her. This, he felt, was the way to tell things as they really were. His chief cause was always the Palestinians. When he was 16 or so, he joined Fatah, which was a militant wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. And when the civil war later broke out in Lebanon, which was actually a civil war caused by disputes over how the Palestinian refugees should be supported, he went off to fight, but almost immediately he was wounded in his right eye, as if fate was trying to tell him that his duty was not to go to war, but actually to stay and tell the truth about the situation. He did speak out sometimes in favor of a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel. But his take was always that it was not the land of Palestine that was sacred to him as much as Palestinians themselves. He sympathized to an extraordinary degree with them. Although since he was Lebanese himself, some of the Palestinians wondered why he thought he had the right to tell stories about Palestine at all. In his view, he had done all the research that was necessary to speak out on the Palestinian side. He worked for a long time at the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut, and there he looked into the history of the camps, and he took down all the details of the miseries of the people there by hearing their stories and also by poring over the records. And he carefully noted all the topography of the camps so that he could tell the stories as accurately as he could. He wrote a good deal about the horror and miseries of the refugee camps and bore the suffering of the Palestinians in his mind continually. But Lebanon was no haven from this. The refugee camps were all there, and Beirut itself had suffered terribly from a number of tragedies. First of all, the civil war, which lasted for 15 years, then the Israeli bombing of 1982, and then in 2020, a huge explosion in the port, which devastated large part of the city. He had loved Beirut when he was growing up there, fallen in love with the old houses, the olive groves on the outskirts, the cafes, the falafel, everything about it. But since all those catastrophes, it had become a shadow. He continued to make it his home, but as early as 1993, he imagined that a stranger might come back one day, not long in the future, to Beirut and find that the city had simply vanished away.

Anne Rowe on Elias Khoury, who has died aged 76. That's it for this episode of The Intelligence. But of course, there's so much more to listen to. With a subscription to Economist Podcast Plus, you have access to all our shows. Subscribing helps make our journalism possible, so thank you. Search Economist Podcast Plus for a free trial. And if you have any comments on today's show, you can get in touch at podcasts@economist.com. We'll see you back here tomorrow.