zenpundit.com

Galrahn at Information Dissemination:

Admiral, Do You Tweet Sir?

….In no small part due to a comment in the article by John Nagl, the Small Wars Journal gets an honorable mention in this article as an example where new media is having influence in the national security debate. While it is possible other areas of new media are having a similar effect, I would argue the Small Wars Journal is the exception, not the rule, and is the only place this is happening. What makes the Small Wars Journal unique?Because it is where active and retired members of the military want to debate their ideas, want their opinions in the open source on any given topic, and Dave has tapped into a community that has become comfortable with their ideas debated in an open forum. The Small Wars Journal has the capacity to “help shape the public debate about national security policy” primarily because those involved in the debate have found value participating in the public debate.

As I have noted in the past, each military service has taken a unique approach to new media. The article highlights unique examples where our military leadership has found utility within new media to introduce and discuss their message. I follow all of these discussions, and they have all met the same challenge: the discussion is still one way and while there is a network, it is yet to become a truly interactive network of idea sharing, or just as relevant, idea shaping.

….What is the role of new media in the national security debate? I have asked this question on the blog since I began blogging, and have seen some brilliant answers in my email and in the comments. This CSM article added another slide to a brief I am building that answers this question. I think it is a really good brief, but the question I still haven’t answered is whether the better audience for the brief is the military services, or the think tanks. That John Nagl hasn’t suggested CNAS buy the Small Wars Journal from Dave suggests to me that the think tanks somehow believe the Web 1.0 model they all currently use will somehow stay relevant in the rapidly evolving information age.

Read the rest here.

Very interesting thoughts by Galrahn and I agree with his assessment of the value of SWJ as it evolved under the stewardship of Dave Dilegge and Bill Nagle though I’m not certain SWJ is unique so much as it is  a succcessful “first” because Dave and Bill did everything right. They allowed a community to form from the ground-up without trying to ramrod an ideological agenda. Sure, SWJ is primarily about COIN but opposing views are invited, welcomed, heard and debated because the moderators are honest brokers and that imparts credibility to the entire enterprise. Intellectual integrity begets quality as well as quantity in terms of readership and submissions.

Tradtional think tanks are not set up to do what SWJ does because they come with either ideological baggage (Heritage, Brookings Carnegie) or institutional affiliations (SSI, CNA, Hoover) that preemptively circumscribe membership, discussion and research interests for fear of drying up the revenue stream. Few large donors, be they Uncle Sam, Richard Mellon Scaife or George Soros, are motivated to open their checkbook by the idea of unfettered inquiry and unlimited time horizons or providing a platform to their professional or political opponents. Attempts by official orgs to imitate SWJ will result in costly but sterile echo chambers. Genuine Web 2.0 interactivity is not desired because it is spontaneous and unpredictable but without that interactivity there’s no spark, no insight and no intellectual productivity.

The Obama White House just started a “blog” but despite the sleek visual design, “The Briefing Room” is a very Web 1.0 format. Media expert Jay Rosen of Press Think  on Twitter described it as “press releases” and scanning the posts leads me to agree with him. It’s very hard for established legacy entities – even one now filled with techies – to embrace the risk of uncontrolled discussion. Perhaps the blog should be farmed out to whatever Obama is calling his private political action group; lacking comments or an authentic, personal, voice The Briefing Room is likely to become a tepid EOB version of Dipnote – except even less interesting.

The SWJ Model can be replicated for other fields but the requirements of independence, community-building, intellectual diversity, relative transparency, openness to membership and free debate appear to be non-negotiable elements. Features, not bugs. 

Two posts that broaden and inform the discussion:

From one of my my co-authors,  Adam Elkus at GroupIntel – “Can Strategy Be Crowdsourced?”:

…Confined to the tactical level, emergent groups often melt away once the tactical action they have formed to accomplish is over. While the anti-Scientology hacker collective Anonymous succeeded in bleeding the Church of Scientology (CoS), they failed to accomplish their stated task of destroying the organization. Anonymous took down some CoS websites, showed up on the streets wearing funny masks, and attracted some media attention. But without any mechanism for exploiting their tactical success, they could not sustain their momentum, making them a purely ephemeral phenomenon. Without the benefit of strategy, all Anonymous could do was cause disorder-but such petty nihilism has rarely accomplished anything of real importance.

Anonymous was kind of cyber-militia, not a band of cyber-soldiers. Galled by what they saw as the CoS’ heavy-handed censorship, they attacked it for a while before retiring back to their usual activities on the 4Chan IRC channel. Americans, ornery and independent by nature, tend to valorize militias and distrust professional militaries. But we often forget that our own militias lacked the means or motivation to battle the British for extended periods of time during the Revolution. Washington found it difficult to make them battle during harvest season, and could not force them to fight far from their homes and families. He required the likes of Baron Von Steuben to mold them into a disciplined and professional fighting force through the usage of repetitive drills and training. Our tech-hype about crowdsourcing is another form of militia worship that may be admirable and egalitarian in spirit but dangerous when it is used to overestimate the strategic abilities of emergent foes.

Read the rest here.

I enjoyed Adam’s post, partly because I rarely get to read something that links Edward Bernays, Jamais Casico and John Searle. I will quibble with Adam in that “crowdsourcing” phenomena or open systems that acquire a “community”aspect with recognizably distinct cultural norms are usually dominated by a “natural aristocracy” among the membership – a cadre of “influencers” who make qualitative contributions frequently and disproportionately and have individual and collective “auctoritas” to police the larger mass than contribute occasionally. There’s a “feedback loop” where certain members of “the crowd” add complex thinking for collective evaluation, modification and ratification. Linux is the original example as is Wikipedia, where senior and elusive”Wikipedians” carry great weight compared to say, me, logging on and editing away. An open mil-related community “crowdsourcing” strategy might do more than a decent job; it would be interesting to run a war game at Quantico with a group of U.S. military operations specialists vs. the membership of the Small Wars Council.

The second post is by “ josephfouche“* at The Committee of Public Safety blog – “The Tactical Loop“:

Elkus argues that the strengths attributed to crowdsourcing and other “wisdom of the crowd” phenomena are potentially strong on the tactical level but fail to scale to higher levels on the CPSOT stack. The higher layers on the stack, when compared to tactics:

• Have OODA loops that operate over longer time-frames, larger space-frames, and involve fewer people per loop and fewer people overall across all groups of loops.
• Have loops that are, to varying degrees, more removed from direct interaction with external forces. This places them in a worse position and under less pressure to observe and adapt to “unfolding interaction” with the environment since that interaction has to be transmitted through tactics and other intermediate layers (producing a higher “signal-to-noise” ratio, as Zen points out).
• Have (increasingly) fewer loops.

Concepts from Howard Bloom’s Global Brain are useful here to demonstrate the elements the higher layers of the CPSOT stack need to align in order to steal some of that vim and vigor from tactics:

1. diversity generators: agents that generate new hypotheses.
2. conformity enforcers: agents that ensure that agents have enough in common to exchange hypotheses.
3. inner-judges: systems that decide if an individual hypothesis is true (it other words, that it survives) or if something is untrue (if it fails).
4. intergroup tournaments: competitions between groups that test the hypotheses produced by one group against hypotheses produced by other groups. Victory produces truth and defeat is the father of lies.
5. resource shifters: systems that do the dirty work for inner judges and intergroup tournaments. They heavily reward winning hypotheses and heavily punish hypotheses that perform poorly. Bloom summarizes this by quoting the Lord: For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

Tactics have more of each of these elements than higher layers on the stack which involve fewer and fewer people. This means fewer hypotheses to loop through and more conformity enforcing gatekeepers. A great deal of what the higher layers do is filter out the multiple hypotheses produced by tactics and its direct interaction with the unfolding environment and use conformity enforcement to pare down the number of hypotheses and make them more consistent. This is similar to how Jeff Hawkins hypothesizes that the human brain works in his memory-prediction framework:

Like tdaxp, I am a big fan of Howard Bloom’s Global Brain and “josephfouche” shares a preference with tdaxp and myself for employing “horizontal” thinking and synthesis in his posts. Ideally the “higher levels” should be filtering out bad or unworkable hypothesis and speculation by some kind of empirical -or at least reasonable – criteria. The problem in our bureaucratic system is the preference for anachronistic frameworks or schemas on the part of senior managers who are doing the filtering (even when the process is untainted by politics or personal agendas). The critical decision-makers need to be in the paradox of have an objective, cognitive distance from the tactical or the small world yet be intimately in touch with it. They must juggle multiple perspectives at once and find a workable synthesis or leverage point.

* Interesting blogging nom de guerre. For those unfamiliar with French history, Joseph Fouche was the Jacobin Terrorist “Butcher of Lyons” who became Napoleon Bonaparte’s – and modern Europe’s first – secret police chief and later managed to serve the restored Bourbon kings in that capacity, though I cannot recall which branch. When asked by Napoleon what he would do if he, Napoleon, were killed in battle, Fouche candidly answered ” Sire, I would try to seize as much power for myself as possible” Nice.

My apologies for the slow posting here and on my related sites. I’m in sort of a Hell Week right now but it will eventually pass.

Therefore, it seems like a propitious moment to call your attention to Antilibrary, a new group blog created by one of my co-authors, A.E. of Rethinking Security. You’ll see many familiar names and some new ones on the vibrant contributor’s list there. I intend to send A.E. a cc’ of my book reviews once I clear my schedule ( I intend to do two big reviews before Christmas – Great Powers and The Culture of War).

Here’s a taste of the Antilibrary ( which, as a parenthetical aside, needs some kind of visual totemic representation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the originator of the “Antilibrary” concept, on the front page. I don’t know the man but I suspect his reaction would veer between irritation and being analogous to  Haile Selassie’s attitude toward the Rastafarians):

The history of ‘warriors for the working-day’

As a teenager I cut my teeth reading military history. John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) came as a revelation. Keegan wrote of three great battles (Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme) at the level of ordinary soldiers – Shakespeare’s ‘warriors for the working-day’ – rather than that of generals and staff officers, as had been the case. 

“I do not intend to write about generals or generalship….I do not intend to say anything of logistics or strategy and very little of tactics in the formal sense.”

More recently the pendulum has swung back, with historians writing very good books that balance the perspective of the ‘poor bloody infantry’ with the operational, strategic and political levels of war. Casting an eye across my book shelves (not my anti-library, I hasten to add), I spotted Adam Zamoyski’s 1812 and Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, both of which exemplify this approach to military approach

Read the rest here.

Austin Bay scored an interview recently with General David Petraeus. For those newer readers not familiar with Austin, he’s a long time blogfriend ( one of my earliest; if I recall correctly, we were also on the H-Diplo listserv together in the pre-blogging era), an author, professor, journalist and Iraq war veteran, where as a colonel in the Army Reserves he commanded an armored unit and was awarded the Bronze Star.

The video of the interview is here ( registration required for the full interview).

A PajamasMedia podcast of the interview can be found here.

Several blog posts by Bay with excerpts from the interview:

Terror Connects to Crime In Iraq: Analysis by General David Petraeus

General Petraeus: “….We have, in fact, put considerable emphasis on how Al-Qaeda, in Iraq, generates resources. And they do it, again, like a mafia does, that we would be familiar with. It’s through extortion of successful businesses; extortion of money for protection rackets, or what have you; insisting that a cell phone business, for example, give them a cut of their profits or they’ll blow the cell phones down – cell phone towers down; taking a cut out of the cement business, the real estate business, the financial businesses, and so forth.
And you see the same on the militia side; although, again, much reduced now and they don’t control the port of Umm Qasr anymore. They don’t control various other elements that they did control until about six to eight months ago.
So progress there. And then beyond that, certainly corruption is a concern and a problem and one that the Iraqis have very much recognized and about which they’re very concerned. They’ve launched an anti-corruption program.
But this is going to be a serious issue. There is considerable money. There is a very young and still very much developing government largely led by individuals who – very good people and good leaders of opposition parties for many years but have not necessarily exercised strategic leadership in the past and very much growing into their jobs but with bureaucracies that are still very much developing as well.”

UPDATE 2: An Interview With General David Petraeus

AUSTIN BAY: Gen. David Petraeus, let’s pick up on your rheostat analogy. You’re giving us a conditions-based approach to assessing victory in a very intricate, complex and long struggle. Now this is an incremental victory-one step up; a half-step back. Enemy action results in a coalition response; coalition actions result in an enemy response. That’s war among human beings. It strikes me that some of those conditions include a sovereign Iraq that is largely responsible for its own internal security, but is also a United States ally. These are some of the conditions mentioned in the Update Strategic Overwatch video at the ArenaUSA.com. That said; if you would, please comment on a sovereign Iraq emerging as a US ally.

Did you get a chance to look at that video?

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: Just briefly, I’m afraid, Austin. But let me just come back to what you just said because the way you stated that is exactly right. It is incremental, and it does have fits and starts. It is this exercise of pushing the stone up a hill, a Sisyphean endeavor at times where you do make two steps up and one step back. Sometimes you get one step up and two steps back.
But, overall, over the course of the past year or so, really since the start of the surge of offenses in particular, that was the large comprehensive offensive launched in June 2007 when we had all of the surge brigades on the ground, since that time, there has been a fairly steady degree of improvement week in/week out, month in/month out. Certainly, again, there have been flare-ups at times. The militia counterattacks, when Prime Minister al-Maliki ordered Iraqi forces and the Basra, were really quite a substantial – more than a flare-up.
But, over time, those were dealt with, more than dealt with, in fact, and very severe losses inflicted on the militia.

 Somehow,  in addition to reporting, Austin  finds the time to write novels,  a syndicated column, blog, give TV interviews and teach undergraduates. I am feeling quite lazy in comparison. LOL!

Ultraguy, who blogs at New Wineskins, was as unhappy as I was about the proposed new rules for internet usage by ongressman, so he wrote a letter to his, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and received this response from Congressman Frank, one of the House’s more liberal members:

Dear Mr. [ultraguy],

I had not been aware of this issue of linkages to Member’s websites and I am not supportive of restrictions here. I must say that I do not think that restricting what Members can link to in their websites is or will lead to “tyranny,” but I have generally been for no restrictions on speech and that is the perspective from which I start. There is a need to keep Members of Congress from subsidizing blatantly political activity with public funds, but I do not think that there needs to be this degree of restriction and I will be talking to my colleagues on the subject in the next couple of weeks. In fact, I wish people who are opposed to restrictions in one area had a consistent view in opposing restrictions on freedom of expression everywhere. That has generally been my position and I will maintain it here as well.

BARNEY FRANK

Ultraguy was not entirely satisfied with this stance but considering that Frank and Capuano come from the same state delegation I’m pleased to see Rep. Frank inclined to use his seniority to lobby against implementing such regulations, sponsored as they are by a close colleague. My own Congressman has yet to even respond to my inquiry. Sad.

Hat tip of the day goes to Ultraguy and to Representative Barney Frank!