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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   526 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.

Rotational schemes also have a key roll in cross-leveling institutional knowledge at the levels between the subject-matter-experts and the client policy-makers. In any given institution, the specific SMEs are rarely the ones directly briefing decision makers. This is because there are incredibly few policy-level topics where a single SME is sufficient. Instead there is inevitably some level of synthesis going on, and that synthesis is often being overseen by other leaders who need to know what other perspective/input is needed for a better whole. Leaders changing portfolios across their careers is important for understanding the interconnection of things related to what their initial expertise was.

This is more commonly recognized on the military side. The classic saying on the military side is that amateurs study tactics while experts study logistics. You do this by taking a weapons officer outside of just the weapons side of thing, and make them responsible for overseeing something more logistical, such as a small organization or some such. Platoon leaders lead platoons, Company Commanders oversee a Company supply section, Battalion Commands have entire supply Companies, and so on.

Well, more expert-experts also study not only logistics, but budgeting and manning. And force protection and military construction. And training and theory. To get senior advisors who can advise on the miltiary as a whole, you need a military progression system that increases exposure and understanding of other parts of the military. Leadership rotation schemes are part of that.

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