Why did campers on Utoya Island have to wait an hour and a half for the police to show up and stop Breivik?
Perhaps the efficiency is “sectoral,” i.e. social services are run smoothly but the police suffer bureaucratic inertia due to, well, too much peace and hence too little pressure to “innovate,” in which case their (heretofore) level of efficiency was more or less appropriate. It just may be that one positive aspect of the militarization of local police forces in the US (due to the WOD) is their ability to deploy a freakin’ helicopter – something the elite members of the Oslo police force apparently didn’t possess.
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July 26, 2011 at 10:44 pm
What terrible analysis.
What percentage of the population was injured or killed in this incident? How will this impact annual mortality per $ spent?
July 27, 2011 at 5:01 am
This is definitely true for world military’s as well. Many standing armies, even if large, are essentially paper tiger forces because they’ve been out of combat for far too long. China’s PLA probably provides a good example.
The hypothetical-scenario system of doctrine and training is a poor match for the adaptive feedback of real-world challenge and refinement of procedures and for the experiential human capital in your veterans who will go on to become your future cadres. Of course it all depends on how well you can anticipate your future missions.
The US military, as a good example of a “tends to rest on laurels and stagnate in the absence of actual shooting” institution that is very poor at predicting the nature of of its next engagement benefits from this iterative process, and so do many of our NATO partners.
A lot of foreign policy pundits are under the impression that these countries are politically allergic and fundamentally reluctant to send their troops to war (half true, but only half), and that the US must be using some kind of amazing voodoo carrot-and-stick pressure diplomacy to encourage them to join our expeditions. But the fact is that a lot of these nations are simply apathetic about what their military does, but their generals know that it helps to “exercise the machine’s muscles, or else they go soft”, so the civilian leaders mostly go along. Instead of “Target of Opportunity” its more like a “Battle Hardening of Opportunity”. The marginal cost for going to war over the costs of just maintaining a peacetime modern standing army is lower than most people think, especially when the US is paying for the most expensive common logistics in a coalition endeavor.
July 27, 2011 at 9:24 pm
In hindsight it would have been nice to have a helicopter, but I can’t say the expected value was that high. It is probably a bad idea to let all of the pilots go on vacation all at once though. I’m inclined to view this as a freak occurrence that couldn’t really be anticipated and probably won’t be anticipated.
The estimated deathtoll is 68 people, which isn’t that large a portion of the Norwegian population but is quite large relative to Norway’s usual homicide rate (which I’ve heard is about 20).
August 23, 2011 at 10:50 pm
[...] Beliefs and Public Attitudes,” a critique of Chris Dillow on, well, that, and “So Much for Efficient Scandinavian Governance,” which is more a throwaway remark than anything [...]