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The Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command has released the 2nd edition of “Joint Operations, Insights and Best Practices “, a 55 page doc of explanation and synthesis.  Good evidence of Boyd’s thought making further inroads into current military thinking but John Robb offers some caveats:

“Unfortunately, despite the good thinking in this report, the US military is getting more rigid and centralized by the day. Why? An improper usage of modern technology is enabling the automation of control and EXTREME micromanagement”

Agreed. Bureaucracy and middle level management, whose existence and authority are being marginalized by the leveling effect of information technology and network structures, are fighting a rearguard effort to use tech for panopticon monitoring of subordinates in order to eliminate discretion, paralyze autonomy and initiative while maximizing hierarchical control. Sort of a Taylorism on steroids.

John Robb is hard at work on Book II which will be about the building of ” Resilient Communities”. He’s batted a few comments about on twitter and worked up a series of posts on the RC theme at his “formal” site. Here are a few samples to give the flavor of his enterprise:

Journal:COIN without a model for Resilience is Futile

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Resilient Community

THE THERMODYNAMIC CRISIS

JOURNAL:Why use the thermodynamic crisis as a framework

DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

“Resilience” is a particularly intriguing concept with multiple meanings though John is honing in on those related to Newtonian physics and complexity theory ( one source in the last post, Ilya Prigogine ,was a significant influence on John Boyd). I particularly liked this bit by John:

The modification of thermodynamics necessary to accommodate this observable fact was formulated by the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine in a theory called “dissipative systems” (read his excellent book: “The End of Certainty” for more). One important leap in this theory is that a dissipative system isn’t a closed system. Rather, it lives within a larger system (an “environment”) that it can interact with.

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

We’ve been pretty good at building up the complexity and are rather poor at dissipating the entropy, mostly for reasons related to the structure of our political system that ties self-interest of politicians and corporate CEOs to short-term frameworks and gives comparative advantage to rentier interests over innovators. The problem has become more difficult because many aspects of “the system” due to globalization are now beyond any state’s control.

Resiliency will involve decentralization and independence within greater interdependence in order to put natural “brakes” on high velocity forces without using draconian state controls ( which won’t work and never did  – except with globalization they will be all side effects and no benefits). I’m very much looking forward to reading what solutions Robb proposes in Book II.

ADDENDUM: Past posts on resiliency:

THE RESILIENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS

DIMENSIONS OF RESILIENCE

LEADERSHIP, RESILIENCE AND OSSIFICATION

COUNTERING 4GW: STATE RESILIENCE, NOT STATE BUILDING, IS KEY

Blogfriend Charles Cameron spotted this post by Flowing Data that has visualizations of social networking on Twitter.

After my Two Quite Reasonable Observations post, I had some uncharacteristically swift and well-informed feedback that pointed to IC amd military working groups, quietly engaged in the very kind of strategic futurism that I hoped to see the USG explore. As I cannot share confidential correspondence, I was delighted that the gents at Kent’s Imperative took up the same cudgel in public.

Vision and error

The recurring debate regarding such matters has once again surfaced in a series of blog posts at Global Guerrillas, Fabius Maximus, Zenpundit, and Opposed Systems Design.We must take exception with John Robb’s comment that there “isn’t a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism”. Such statements, of course, are a common enough type of criticism which stems from what is also unfortunately a common error – the assumption that because one is not aware of a particular effort, then it must not exist. While not every shop which concerns itself with the problems of contemporary asymmetric conflict looks up from the current fight, there are a number of efforts which have attempted to answer the question of “what next” alongside the other work exploring the “what” and “so what” which tends to dominate current publications. Among just a few of the recent public aspects of such efforts that we can name off the top of our heads are the Proteus project, JFCOM’s Deep Futures project, and several of the publications authored by folks at the USMC’s Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, the Naval War College and Army War College, the Naval Postgraduate School, the Air University, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, the National Defense Intelligence College, and many other elements within the khaki tower. Of course, to this we should also add the Global Futures Forum effort where it touches upon related areas of interest.

….We would also argue that this is already occurring to some extent within the intelligence community itself, particularly given the emerging style of smaller, more specific papers circulated in an almost academic fashion as discussion points. Indeed, we see this beginning to reshape coordination efforts prior to more formalized, and more visible assessments for major publications. We certainly see a greater role for outside subject matter experts and other thinkers in the process, but while far from perfect, this is quickly evolving given recent emphasis on analytic outreach.In short, the there that these gentlemen appear to be reaching for is already there – just not evenly distributed….”

This is certainly good news, from my perspective. Hopefully, those readers out there – and there appear to be more than I had realized – who have their hands in this process on ” the inside” will continue to push the USG’s intellectual range and bureaucratic boundaries. We are all well-served by their sub rosa efforts and I offer a hearty “Huzzah!” in their honor.

From John Robb at Global Guerillas:

The US national security budget is nearly $700 billion a year (much more if the total costs of Iraq/Afghanistan are thrown in), more than the rest of the world combined. Unfortunately, within that entire budget there isn’t a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism. Fatally, most of the big thinkers working on the future of warfare do their critical work in their spare time, usually while working other jobs to put food on the table for their families. In sum, this deficit in imagination will soon be the critical determinant on whether the national security bureaucracy remains relevant in a rapidly changing global security environment. That relevance is the key to its future.

From Fabius Maximus:

This has been criticised as dividing insurgencies into rigid categories – black and white, not accounting for the shades of grey found in all human experiences.  That is both true and a good thing.  All rules of thumb are arbitary, in some sense, but useful for practicioners who know their limitations.  Even the exceptions to this “rule” about insurgencies, and I believe they are quite few, tell us something new.  For example, the Malayan Emergency shows the importance of having a legitmate local government to do the heavy lifting (even though the COIN literature tend to follow the Brits’ view, considering it “their” win – not that of the locals).

The value of these kinds of insights was well expressed by a post Opposed Systems Design (4 March 2008):

A deeper understanding of these dynamics deserves an organized research program. The first concept – an artifically binary distinction between “foreign COIN” and “native COIN” – has served its purpose by highlighting the need for further work on the subject.

One reason for our difficulty grappling with 4GW is the lack of organized study.  We could learn much from a matrix of all insurgencies over along period (e.g., since 1900), described in a standardized fashion, analyzed for trends.  This has been done by several analysts on the equivalent of “scratch pads” (see IWCKI for details), but not with by a properly funded multi-disciplinary team (esp. to borrow or build computer models).

 We are spending trillions to fight a long war without marshalling or analysing the available data.  Hundreds of billions for the F-22, but only pennys for historical research.  It is a very expensive way to wage war.

When the Cold War was as young, the newest of America’s armed services, the Air Force, sought an intellectual edge over their venerable and tradtion-bound brothers and funded the ur-Think Tank, RAND Corporation. I say “funded” because the USAF brass, while they expected products that would justify a strategic raison d’etre for the Air Force to Congress, wisely allowed their creation autonomy and this in turn yielded intellectual freedom, exploration and creativity. The Air Force and the United States were richly rewarded by these egghead “wild men” who advanced nuclear warfighting and deterrence strategies, Game Theory analytics,  a renaissance in wargaming, Futurism and a multilpicity of other successes. Moreover, RAND itself became a model for a proliferation of other think tanks that created an intellectual zone for public intellectuals and scientists outside of the constraints of academia.

We need something like that today. A few years back, I called for a “DARPA for Foreign Policy” but the need is equally critical in considering the future of war and conflict as is taking a multidisciplinary, intersectional, insight-generating “Medici Effect” approach.

We can do better.

Wow-That-Was-Fast Department:

Wiggins extends the conversation on RAND’s origins as an inspiration for today.