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Major Michael Few had a short theoretical post that sparked an important discussion at SWJ Blog and other social networking sites. He’s wrestling with the military-tactical effects of diminishing returns. Well worth your time to read through:

Less is Often More?

This is a post that I never would have written while practicing the art in Iraq. On the ground level, every commander wants more forces. In fact, one of the unstated prerequisites for command is that you must conduct at least one daily bitching session where you emphatically describe how much more effective you could be if you were given another platoon, company, battalion, etc…

– More forces equal more villages and more neighborhoods you can clear and occupy.
– More forces equal more visible power and control.
– More resources equal more money to bribe your enemies.

But, sometimes more is actually less:

– More forces mean that you can act unilaterally and just ignore the impotent host nation security forces.
– More forces mean that you can coerce and bully the corrupt political leaders.
– More resources mean that you may waste money building elaborate schools and medical clinics and digging canals rather than repairing the existing suitable structures.

Sometimes with more, we merely attack the symptoms creating short-term visible gains rather than attacking the root problems. Doctrinally, we would call this creating maneuver space on the human and physical terrain.

Read the rest here.

The two fine organizations to which I contribute in my own small way:

Small Wars Journal Events Listing and Newsletter # 2

We distribute an extensive listing of small wars related events in our monthly newsletter – Number 2 to be distributed on Wednesday, 1 June. Sign up here for the newsletter and visit our Facebook page for an alternate SWJ events listing.

Wikistrat

Read Middle East Monitor for May 2011.

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[Cross-posted from SWJ Blog]

Major Mike Few, one of the SWJ Blog’s trusty editors opines on the nuts and bolts of “doing grand strategy”. Pay close attention to points #2 and #7. Hopefully, the first of many guest posts here by Major Few, if I can steal some of his time from Dave Dilegge 🙂 :

The Serenity Prayer for Grand Strategy: Nine-Step Recovery Method for Reframing Problem Solving

by Mike Few

Recently, our authors began to shift from problem definition to reframing problem solving. Over the last year, we published some remarkable works effectively describing Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Libya, and others. Simultaneously, we published several series on design and wicked problems.

The challenge we are posing is can someone produce a concise document applying design to an existing problem? If we cannot find practical application or wisdom, then the process becomes a moot effort. Below is my white board attempt to provide an example and discussion for others to follow. This blog post is similar to many of the discussions our authors and readers have daily in the classroom and nightly at the pub or dinner with colleagues. Simply put, I am merely merging the sum of our published thought and discussions.

Three years ago, I was challenged to determine if my experiences in big wars and counterinsurgency could be applied to the macro level. On the tactical level, I found that I simply relearned the lessons of those that had come before me, the countless art of war and warfare. However, when I consider how my thinking had changed, I feel that perhaps there are some lessons that can be applied for us all.

In combat, I finally learned the limits of my own control. This understanding freed me to concentrate focusing on changing the things that I could control. I look at framing problem solving in international relations in a similar manner. It’s kind of like the Serenity Prayer for Grand Strategy. So, as a practical exercise, below is an example of how I would use Design, Wicked Problems, and Military Decision Making Process using the example of Mexico.

1. Define what we cannot control. We cannot “fix” Mexico. They are a sovereign nation-state, and they must choose to work on their internal issues. Moreover, our “solution” to their problems may not be a proper fit despite our best intentions. Our intervention efforts in Central and South America over the past sixty years (or more) have had mixed results.

2. Define the problem as it is not as we wish to see it. Are we really in a war on poverty, drugs, education, terrorism, and governance? Are we really at war? Labels are often limiting, but there needs to be some common framework to understanding. Typically, that can be driven by good communication and active listening. We must learn to transcend how “I” see the problem and work towards how the collective group sees the problem accounting for all stakeholders.

3. Define our relationship. How does the US and Mexico see each other? This perception requires a degree of self-introspection and humility. Are we a brother attempting to help our sibling overcome addiction or work through difficult financial times? Are we a parent disciplining a spoiled child? Are we a spouse in a broken marriage? How we see ourselves defines our national interest. If we see ourselves as the parent, then we’re self-imposing a conceptual block.

As Martin Luther King wrote while sitting in the Birmingham Jail,

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds…In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.”

4. Describe what we are currently doing and how we can adjust these things.

– Impact of NAFTA
– Border Security
– FID efforts in Mexico
– Counter-Drug efforts in Mexico
– Counter-Drug efforts in the United States
– Anti-Gang efforts in the United States

5. Discuss the cost benefits of future intervention efforts and internal reforms

– Comprehensive immigration reform
– Dream Act
– Expanded Counter-Drug efforts
– Expanded FID efforts to better strengthen Mexico’s Army and Police internal security forces
– State Department “better” governance efforts (Plan Colombia)- to include judicial and economic issues
– Legalizing drugs in the continental United States (demand side interdiction)
– Comprehensive Prison Reform in the United States
– Treasury Department financial interdiction to narco banking
– Promoting and expanding free press in Mexico through Twitter, Facebook, and new media

6. Describe Area of Influence- Central and South America

– Illegal immigration from Guatemala
– Drug Trafficking from Colombia

7. Ask the hard questions

-What are the key factors driving the problem?
-What is the causality?
-And, if the analysis is from a U.S. perspective, to what degree and in what ways is the problem a problem for the United States?
-what ways do those in power benefit by the status quo?

8. Rethinking the Assumptions

-What are the desired outcomes?
-Is the policy driving the process or is the effort outcome based?
-Are our efforts helping or hurting?

9. Timing of Implementation

– Simultaneous, Sequential, or Cumulative
-Prepare to accept that some items are not decision points; Rather, they are processes that change and morph over time.

Special thanks to those that contributed to the proofreading of this post, and I would like to specifically highlight Dr. Nancy Robert’s methodology for teaching any class on problem solving,

A. Creativity
B. Problem Framing
C. Systems thinking
D. Entrepreneurship and Innovation
E. Collaboration in Networks

Now, let the discussion and writing continue…

Altars to Santa Muerte, “Saint Death” to the poor and the narcocultos

SWJ has been en fuego the last few days and this is the first of several that I recommend that readers give close attention.

Dr. Robert J. Bunker and Lt. John Sulivan are indicating that the canary in the coal mine phase of Mexico’s narco-insurgency has passed. Mexican society is entering a new and more dangerous period of accelerating cultural devolution. Nacro-insurgent violence has shifted from the economically motivated and brutally instrumental of organized crime syndicates everywhere to culturally totemic and ghastly ceremonials out of tribal prehistory:

Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border? by Dr. Robert J. Bunker and John P. Sullivan

…Our impression is that what is now taking place in Mexico has for some time gone way beyond secular and criminal (economic) activities as defined by traditional organized crime studies.3 In fact, the intensity of change may indeed be increasing. Not only have de facto political elements come to the fore-i.e., when a cartel takes over an entire city or town, they have no choice but to take over political functions formerly administered by the local government- but social (narcocultura) and religious/spiritual (narcocultos) characteristics are now making themselves more pronounced. What we are likely witnessing is Mexican society starting to not only unravel but to go to war with itself. The bonds and relationships that hold that society together are fraying, unraveling, and, in some instances, the polarity is reversing itself with trust being replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Traditional Mexican values and competing criminal value systems are engaged in a brutal contest over the ?hearts, minds, and souls‘ of its citizens in a street-by-street, block-by-block, and city-by-city war over the future social and political organization of Mexico. Environmental modification is taking place in some urban centers and rural outposts as deviant norms replace traditional ones and the younger generation fully accepts a criminal value system as their baseline of behavior because they have known no other. The continuing incidents of ever increasing barbarism-some would call this a manifestation of evil even if secularly motivated-and the growing popularity of a death cult are but two examples of this clash of values. Additionally, the early rise of what appears to be cartel holy warriors may now also be taking place. While extreme barbarism, death cults, and possibly now holy warriors found in the Mexican cartel wars are still somewhat the exception rather than the rule, each of these trends is extremely alarming, and will be touched upon in turn.

Read the rest here.

Some of the anecdotes in this article read like the climax scenes of Apocalypse Now in the Cambodian lair of Marlon Brando’s insane Colonel Kurtz or a bloody reverie of Hannibal Lecter. While the scale is not the same, the mad cruelty equals anything seen in the eastern Congo and seems to surpass everywhere else.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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Blog-friend Cameron Schaefer has a piece up at Small Wars Journal today in which he quotes Boyd (writing that his approach “incorporated science, but more closely approximated the often chaotic, creative impulses of art”) and Mahan (“art, out of materials which it finds about, creates new forms in endless variety”), and concludes:

Approaching strategy in an indirect fashion, as more of an art than science may make some uneasy, specifically those who find safe haven in the concreteness of checklists and formulas. Yet, the nature of strategy reflects the nature of the world. It is infinitely complex, it is always changing and it is filled with humans that often do irrational things. Literature (see Charles Hill) and psychology have as much of a place at the strategy table as military history… as do mathematics, physics, political science and technology. So, when asking, “what must one study to be a great strategist?” the answer seems to be, “everything else.”

Okay, so that (and Hill‘s work, which Zen reviewed recently) gives us the significance of the arts in strategic thinking which, one hopes, is practiced before going in to battle, and may indeed give one second thoughts about it…

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Literature and the arts are also important after battle, though – and the US Military and DARPA have clearly been thinking about that side of things:

Sources: Comics – Plays

Poetry? meh… Sophocles? Chlanna nan con thigibh a so’s gheibh sibh feoil!

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Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox in The Imperial Animal characterize modern health care as the “bureaucratization of mercy” and propose that for comparison, we set it beside:

the Greek ideal of the hospital as the place with the best food, the finest furnishings and paintings, and the most skilled musicians and comedians.

The greatest healing center in ancient Greece was the Asclepion at Epidavros / Epidaurus, which housed an amphitheater that could seat more than ten thousand people for dramatic and musical performances without amplification.

At Epidavros, patients would be healed by watching those same dramas of Sophocles to which the US Army is now turning for therapeutic relief in Guantanamo — for as Tiger and Fox (what a pair of names) go on to argue:

It is not the healthy, but the sick who most vitally needed such agreeable and re-creative stimuli; and the resources the community had were most beneficially and sanely used in helping them ease their personal disarray and feel encouraged by this display of their community’s careful concern.

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It’s also interesting to note that the graphic novel Silver Shields mentioned in Axe‘s piece as a precursor to DARPA’s “Online Graphic Novel/Sequential Art Authoring Tools for Therapeutic Storytelling” project is “set during the ancient Greek invasion of Afghanistan more than two millenniums ago” as a metaphor for America’s current situation…