People, ideas, machines IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

How the British deep state organised to defeat Napoleon. Intelligence. Procurement. Manufacturing capacity. Technology. Civil service reform. Balance of Power...

Dis te minorem quod geris, imperas

(Thou rulest because thou bearest thyself as lower than the Gods)

Horace (quoted by Burke 1795, noted by Metternich)

I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.

The last public words of William Pitt, in response to a toast in his honour as ‘the Saviour of Europe’, shortly after Trafalgar 1805

I want one great and essential quality for my station… I am not competent to the management of men. I never was so naturally and toil and anxiety more and more unfit me for it.

Prime Minister Grenville

I’ve tidied this up, shifted all Snippets to a new blog, this one is now just for Pitt & Metternich...

CRUCIAL LESSONS (almost complete)

Update 2/12: CH16: Final Victory — the end of the The Organization of Victory.

Update 29/11: CH14: Russia and the Peninsula, 1812-13

Update 13/11: CH13: Blockade, Taxes and the City of London, 1806-12

Update 10/11: CH12: The Defense Industries, 1800-14

Update 5/11: CH11: Government scandal and reform, 1803-12.

Update 2/11: CH9: Invasion Threat, 1803-12 & CH10: Intelligence 1803-11

Update 26/10: Metternich and world war 1806-12.

Update 6/10: a/ Metternich’s life as ambassador 1801-6, from the Peace of Amiens to Ulm, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, end of the Third Coalition and Pitt’s death. b/ CH8: Political Instability and the Conduct of the War, 1802-1812. c/ SNIPPETS.

Update 29/9: CH7: Transporting the Army by Sea, 1793-1811.

Update 20/9: CH6: Feeding the Armed Forces and the Nation, 1795-1812.

Update 18/9: a/ CH5: Intelligence and Communications, 1793-1801. b/ SNIPPETS.

Update 9/9: a/ Metternich returns to the Continent July 1794, b/ CH3 The First Crisis, 1795-98, c/ SNIPPETS.

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Introduction

I hope subscribers found the previous blog in this series on the CIA and Angleton interesting. It’s 99% finished, just a tweak of the conclusions to finish.

In this blog I’ll do notes on two books.

Britain Against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793-1815, by Roger Knight (TOOV).

It focuses not on the battles and political dramas but on the organisation:

• how the forces were built and supported

• intelligence

• communications

• procurement

• infrastructure and logistics planning such as ports, fortifications, canals

• tax and finance

• manufacturing capacity, R&D, new technology

• civil service reform

• how critical decisions were made.

One of many interesting things about TOOV is how it illustrates the way that operational excellence used to be high status. It has become the lowest status thing in Westminster. During the constitutional crisis of 2019 I told Tory special advisers to read Andy Grove’s classic High Output Management and ignore the noise of punditry. How the pundits howled at the idea of political people studying how to run meetings instead of jabbering to them. Daniel Finkelstein, as so often, spoke for Westminster when he said he found it ‘really boring’.

People who care about these things are seen sort of like sewage workers — somebody has to do it but it doesn’t occur to 99% of those aspiring to high status to lower themselves to such things as logistics and procurement. Management is an unmentionable word. Almost no MPs have any idea that they have no idea even how to run a meeting (MP ‘meetings’ tend to degrade towards each MP giving a speech while other MPs look at their phones). Those aspiring to high status in SW1 want ‘strategy’ in their job titles while they spend their time on the opposite of ‘strategy’ — SW1’s daily emotional rollercoaster of ephemeral news and punditry, a world of constant panic and little urgency, a world that can never focus on priorities long enough to get hard things done but couldn’t build hard things even if it could focus because it doesn’t value or know how to do operational excellence. We’ve fallen a long long way since Pitt.

If you’re a Labour spad pondering the next few years of managing one Whitehall debacle after another as Labour MPs gradually, and very patchily, become aware that switching ministers doesn’t solve the core problems because the pathological institutions fight intensely not for the public but to maintain themselves in a state of constant failure, I highly recommend you read this book and enjoy exploring a time when Whitehall actually was ‘world leading’. Beware though, its most important lessons will mostly be ‘unlawful’ and ‘contrary to HR’ today and if you pipe up ‘errr this is mad why don’t we do the obviously sensible thing instead’, you’ll be on Sue Gray’s chopping block sharpish. Remember the first rule of SW1: the Government does not control the Government, officials control most of government via ‘meritocratic open competition’ which, naturally, means their closed caste get all the jobs and power.

Metternich: Strategist and Visionary, by Siemann. This is a recent biography by someone who spent years in the original archives. It follows Metternich from his education pre-1789 through the Revolution and Napoleonic war to his death after the 1848 Revolutions. I put some post-1814 stuff from this book into my Bismarck Chronology.

I wrote a few months ago on how we are living through a cycle of regime change similar to that of the 1840s-60s. We look at a period like that and try to abstract some ‘lessons of history’. Historians argue. But we should recognise how much harder than the job of historians it was for even the most perceptive contemporaries to understand even a little of what was happening as they were living through it. It’s impossible for anyone ever to get more than a very hazy, fragmented sense of how a) powerful forces acting over decades (like automation) collide with b) individual decisions that are almost entirely irrelevant but occasionally profoundly nonlinear. And when you’re in the middle of it, surrounded by chaos and noise, even the wisest and most effective people in history are, as Bismarck said, ‘groping about like a child in the dark’. Today we are groping around ‘like a child in the dark’ as they were in the 1840s-60s, blown about by Tolstoy’s historic forces and most of our decisions amounting to nothing, but the odd one changing the branching histories of the future.

It will be valuable to explore 1) how the British state organised itself to deal with this earlier cycle of war, revolution and regime change before the pernicious virus of the Northcote-Trevelyan civil service and its fake meritocracy came in the 1850s (and compare it to lessons from Alanbrooke and RV Jones roughly half way between those changes and today) and 2) how Metternich navigated the same problems. We can compare the perspectives from a) Whitehall and b) one of the main figures on the Continent (and at some times the main figure) struggling with the same nightmares — a cosmopolitan aristocrat who believed in a European political community and a sort of ‘European common law’ protected by the balance of power.

In many ways the capabilities of the British state were far greater in the 1780s-1815 than they are now, in particular the talents of leading politicians and officials and the ability to organise hard things fast. In many ways, the Whitehall of the 1780s-1815 had more in common with the elite performance and culture of today’s Silicon Valley than it does 200 years later. And Pitt was recognisably much more similar to the likes of Elon or General Groves than any senior Minister of modern times, and his management style had far more in common with SpaceX than does today’s Cabinet Office, which would declare the Whitehall of Pitt almost all unconstitutional and ‘unlawful’. Ministers then were actually responsible rather than fake responsible as now.

Almost everybody in SW1 today would say ‘it’s impossible to run things like Pitt did, there’s no realistic alternative to how it’s done’. This is wrong. The error is a product of the fact that almost nobody in SW1 has ever worked in a high performance entity with an actual leader with a taste for talent. They have no intuitive feel for what it is like. All they know is pathological bureaucracies where the system is running the NPCs. The central irony of the Northcote-Trevelyan system is the way it morphed from supposedly meritocratic to actually a fake meritocracy with fake responsibility, an increasingly corrupt system that excludes and weeds out merit and suppresses individual responsibility while preserving the power and budgets of the largely useless caste that is the permanent government, neither meritocratic nor focused on ‘public service’ but on themselves. Their grip on power is slipping. But that’s for another day…

AI and European elites

These issues are also highly relevant to AI, power, and issues touched on in Leopold’s essay around how AI is forcing a rethink about how western states function. On one hand the old regimes are crumbling, on the other hand AI requires a transition to different core institutions for political power and a new international regime to accommodate the rise of China without a Great Power war — something that seems to me likely to be at least as world-shaking as the shift from medieval to ‘modern’ states, the creation of centralised taxation, standing armies etc. What replaces our crumbling regimes might easily be a dystopian horrorshow but it could also be a radical improvement on the state that evolved in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Having resolutely ignored AI, SW1 briefly perked up after Chat-GPT to write their usual ‘takes’ and has now herded to ‘oh it’s a fad/bubble’ and gone back to sleep on the subject. This is classic SW1, reliably wrong whenever it herds to a new conventional wisdom.

It’s natural for much of SW1 to align with EU elites who have introduced the strongest anti-AI regulations in the world and are kneecapping their own technology sector, as I said would happen 2015-16 in the referendum. UK/EU elites will develop a schizophrenic attitude: on one hand they will laugh at ‘tech bros’ and tweet ‘fad/bubble/scam’ (‘AI isn’t important’), on the other hand they will shriek with terror that ‘the fascist tech bros’ must be controlled by stringent regulations, ‘fascist Elon is allowing fascist deepfake disinformation’ (‘AI is important’).

They’re comfortable with such cognitive dissonance, do not assume it’s too stupid and self-defeating to persist, the whole trend is for these political-media-academia elites to radicalise in increasingly absurd and self-defeating ways and this is a natural area for the phenomenon to play out. You can already see these elites entirely comfortable with the cognitive dissonance of a) ‘the EU must have strategic autonomy’, which requires fundamentally different EU policies and execution on technology, while b) it kneecaps its own technology sector in so many ways, which is the opposite of what you do if you actually want ‘strategic autonomy’. They aren’t bothered by such absurdity. Just as they aren’t bothered by the absurdity of pushing through GDPR to ‘hit big tech’ even though they were told it would not have this effect and of course it has had the opposite effect. They just move on to the next thing.

This radicalisation process is so powerful that you will see much of SW1 try to push the government into aligning the UK with the EU’s tech/AI regulation. In a rare case of a clear Brexit win, Britain is outside this regulation simply because it happened after we left so SW1 did not have to execute anything hard to get a win, it happened by default and because in 2019 we insisted that the UK would not align with such future regulations when obviously the Treasury tried to sign us up to all future EU stupidity. There’s a powerful faction in SW1 who will argue ‘it’s in our interests to align’ then when they’ve destroyed a big advantage for Britain over the EU, and startups and talent leave for California, they’ll say ‘this is another area where there was no Brexit benefit’.

The absurdity will roll off their tongues without hesitation. The fact that it makes all our problems worse, from productivity to the MOD and NHS, won’t matter because they just construct an alternative mental universe where, miraculously, more government spending plus more EU regulation will magic-hand-wave-DEI-consensus-social-Europe-blahblahblah make up for Europe’s technology failures. Again it will mostly be a mistake to think of them as ‘lying’ and more accurate to think of them as radicalised online and delusional. Ironically, one of the few reasons to hope SW1 avoids its normal trajectory of dumb self-defeating failure is super-Remainer Blair, who is ahead of the SW1 pack, realises the importance of technology and how the EU is kneecapping itself, and is urging Labour NOT to align with the EU here…

Cf. the bottom of this blog for an idea on who should run the NSC AI Taskforce created by the next President.

(Ps. The Cabinet Office succeeded in removing the AI/data science capability we built for the PM’s office. HMT and Cabinet Office much preferred the PM’s office in the dark to having better information than them. Simon Case tried to use Truss to destroy it, half missed, but used the regime change to achieve the HMT/Cabinet Office goal. Another loss for the country, unnoticed in SW1 and uncovered by the old media. If you’re a Labour spad in No10, you’ve been screwed and you should go talk to the officials who built this and ask for a demonstration of the dashboards they built for the PM’s private office, which have vanished from the computers of spads and ministers. A test of your skills is if you can see this or if you let the Cabinet Office block the demo; a platinum medal if you manage to restore the system… When the next disaster hits and the old media jabber about how it’s being handled, remember that Whitehall sabotaged itself again rather than change its ways, it prefers to fail, it will fight to fail.)

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TSP

I’ll post in the week of 9 September on The Startup Party. A few words only on this for now. I’ve been quiet on this blog because I’ve been working on this.

I’m withdrawing from most other projects to focus on the new thing from September. I’m talking to potential cofounders, staff, donors, and supporters of all kinds about what to build. I’m circulating draft notes and plans etc. I’m thinking about the corporate and legal structures, how we raise money from around the world, how we prioritise and sequence efforts. (NB. we will be able to raise and spend money (for most of our goals) from around the world without disclosure of any kind.)

If you are rich and want to do something to fight against the vandalism of our useless political class, be very careful about giving money to the grifters and ‘think tank projects’ springing up in rancid SW1. Look at the baseline probability of success for such efforts. The chances they achieve anything meaningful are close to zero. The ‘think tanks’ and ‘campaigns’ of Tory world are almost all fake, they are ‘the Rwanda policy’ of political action, an alternative to useful action, something for SW1 to pretend is real rather than something that really does something, something aimed almost entirely at SW1 entertainment rather than real change. Tory world cannot build. Tory world sabotages people trying to build. Tory MPs were a bigger obstacle than my ostensible opponent on every major project I’ve done in SW1:

a/ The anti-euro campaign 1999-2001.

b/ The North East referendum 2004.

c/ School reform 2007-14.

d/ Building Vote Leave to win the referendum. Brexit was done TO, not BY, Tory MPs. We had to shuffle them onto Potemkin committees 2015-16 so we could build the startup without their sabotage (deliberate and accidental). This accounts for a lot of the problems since. They never understood why we won and never understood what to do with the victory.

e/ Changing how power works in Whitehall and how No10 works 2019-20.

A crucial thing to remember when thinking about Tory world is they don’t win because they are not actually trying to win, they are just trying to be players in the rancid SW1 game and don’t want that game disrupted by attempts to change its basic rules and agreed goals.

In the Michael Cimino movie Year of the Dragon, with Mickey Rourke, there’s a great scene where his senior management are trying to persuade Rourke to lay off the case — we’ve got an arrangement with the Chinese mafia, you’re screwing it up for everybody etc. It really reminded me of Tory World.

Management: The point here is you cease and desist.

Mickey Rourke: Yeah and what if I don’t, huh? What are you gonna do?… I been swallowing the bullshit around here for ten years and I’m chokin’ on it.

Management: You ever think about your pension?'

Mickey Rourke: Fuck the pension, that’s what's wrong with this whole goddamn police department. Everybody’s so worried about their pension.

Management: Never in the history of the department have I ever heard anything like this, this is a fucking disgrace.

Mickey Rourke: No, Lou, this is a fuckin’ war and I'm not gonna lose it. Not this one. Not over politics. It's always fuckin’ politics [smashes cup off table]… Nobody wants to win this thing, do you, just flat out win, do they?

Management: If you go the press again you know what you’re doing? You’re putting a gun to my head.

Mickey Rourke: That’s what we are — we’re four guys in a room with a gun to our heads.

Fuck the pension… Nobody wants to just flat out win…

My experience of SW1 for 25 years! MP after MP, loser after loser in 2020 kept saying ‘but it’s so NOISY, we can’t ANTAGONISE THE SYSTEM, think about your REPUTATION, your FUTURE EARNINGS, don’t make an enemy of THE MEDIA, of WHITEHALL’… These losers never even WANTED to win, never wanted to TRY to win, forget being ABLE to win.

Do you want to win? If you want to help something that changes the rancid SW1 game, save your time and money to build something valuable…

Please do not comment on TSP here but wait for the week of 9/9.

Thanks for subscribing. As subscribers can see, this blog is a very cheap way to be consistently ahead of the entire mainstream news-pundit-NPC complex on all important issues from the programmed failures of the Ukraine war to Biden’s senility.

If you want to be surprised by news, follow ‘the news’ — it guarantees you’ll be anti-informed because the biggest disinformation in the UK is not ‘social media’ or ‘Russia’ or ‘the far Right’ but the old political parties and Whitehall press offices — especially the Cabinet Office press office which lies more, and more brazenly and with least consequences, than any entity in Whitehall with the occasional exception of the MoD. Just watch what they say about the enormous classified black holes of the nuclear budgets that are cannibalising the conventional budgets. All lies, all fake budgets, all fake OBR numbers…

If you want to be unsurprised by news, subscribe!

Ps. Our new Foreign Secretary also has a lot to say about fascism and disinformation. He, like most NPCs, has been a sucker for disinformation himself. Here he is in 2019 swallowing far Left/Remainer conspiracy theories about me being ‘a Russian spy’. When he gives his inevitable speeches about ‘online radicalisation’, remember that he is a perfect example of it…

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Previous in this series:

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them. (This is 99% finished, a little tidying up to do.)

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). (Me, 3/2022)

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut, and one that ~100% of those in politics are too lazy or deluded to grasp! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

‘The Revolution is Saturn, it devours its own children.’