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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1090 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 24, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Extremely long Cummings substack piece: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/a-talk-on-regime-change

If you had to read one part, read the speech he gave at Oxford, skip to: Text, Oxford, 19 June 2025

It's staggering. I'm one of the biggest Cummings-trusters and I thought he was overdoing it when it comes to the Civil Service on rotations. I check it and it's true. It's the most retarded idea I've heard for some time.

And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

So much from his anecdotes (always the best parts of Cummings, otherwise he just repeats his main themes) reads like it came out of Yes Minister. The power of the Cabinet Secretary and impotence of the PM, Ministers just reading out their briefs, cabinet decisions made in advance by the official who drafts the minutes, everyone desperately beholden to the media. There's that bit about a lack of individual accountability for projects, straight out of the 1980s: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-pQcNKFoIDE

Sir Arnold from the show: "We already move our officials around every two or three years to stop this personal responsibility nonsense, if this scheme passes we'll be reposting them once a fortnight!'

I honestly like rotation schemes like this. There's a reason the military (in basically every developed country) does this. It prevents all sorts of corruption, promotes loyalty to the broader organization over narrow silos within the organization, and develops a generalized competence.

It might be implemented poorly in the UK, but that's not a reason to dislike the organizational system in principle.

Really? I don't think armies have people switching between infantry, electronic warfare, logistics and so on. You specialize and largely stay in your lane. You might have an opportunity to change lanes from time to time if your knees are shot and need a desk job... But one of the standard features of Western armies is that they have a highly experienced NCO corps who've done the same thing for ages and really know what they're doing. How could they gather that expertise as weapons officers or whatever if they're constantly moving around?

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