Recommended Reading
Top Billing! Matt Armstrong – Hybrid Threats Require a Hybrid Government
….The focus on improving the operational elements of national power, while necessary, ignores a critical national security actor that has received little to no attention or pressure to adapt to the new and emerging requirements: Congress. Blended threats require blended authorities and budgets to support the necessary hybridization of executive agencies. Congressional committees must have a common understanding of current capabilities, problems, and requirements. They should communicate among themselves, just as they are increasingly demanding of the executive branch, but the reality is something else.Congress must adapt otherwise many of the reforms suggested, required, and even implemented may face unnecessary delays and suffer from uninformed oversight. The Congressional committee system is a valuable scheme providing checks and balances and intentionally dilutes power. In practice, the lack of communication and coordination can create confusion and limit support, oversight, and understanding the requirements of various programs.
Steven Pressfield – COIN in a Tribal Society: an interview with William S. “Mac” McCallister and Shame and Honor, not Hearts and Minds: an interview with William S. “MAC” McCallister, #2
William McCallister is a former military officer, defense consultant, deep thinker and a provocative voice at SWJ and the Warlord Loop. Well worth your time.
Schmedlap – The Graduate Level of Warfare
….Ironically, the reason that some assert COIN to be some higher level of warfare is because those people misunderstand the root of our difficulty with it. They see inadequate training and conclude that our skills have been focused on a specific level of (less) complexity, rather than recognizing that our skills have been focused on one specific set of missions. If two grapplers prepare for a bout, but one bows out before the fight and a stand-up fighter replaces him, we do not say that the remaining grappler failed to prepare for the “higher level” of fighting. He simply prepared for the wrong type of fight. Likewise, our training thus far has been in preparation for the wrong type of operation.
I started reading Schmedlap after seeing his pragmatic and informed comments at SWJ Blog and recommend that you do as well.
WIRED – Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009
Thomas P.M. Barnett – The New Rules: The Naughties Were Plenty Nice
Tom would have made a good “Open Door” diplo historian as befits an alum of Wisconsin ( home of William Appleman Williams)
Pundita –Whaddya mean there was no smoking gun, Mr Brennan? More nonsense from Abdulmutallab terror case
…..ABC ferreted out the truth behind news reports that Umar Abdulmutallab’s father alerted the U.S. Embassy about his concern that his son had gotten involved with radicals. The way such reports were worded conveyed the idea that the CIA didn’t have a smoking gun to work with. Actually, the CIA had a smoking cannon handed to them.ABC learned that what really happened is that Umar phoned his father to say he was calling for the last time because the people he was with in Yemen were going to destroy his SIM card. That would make his phone unusable. And that was as much telling his father he was entering the final phase of training for a terrorist suicide mission.His father immediately alerted Nigerian intelligence officials that he was afraid his son was preparing for a terrorist mission in Yemen. The officials then brought him directly into the presence of the CIA station chief in Abuja on November 19.So it’s not as if some worried father wandered in off the street to unburden himself to a clerk at a U.S. embassy. And note that the Nigerian intelligence officials didn’t run the risk of getting trapped in voice mail hell or hearing, ‘I’m sorry your email got lost in the shuffle.’ They made Double Dutch sure the station chief heard the father’s statement and understood its import and urgency.
That’s it!
January 5th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
"….Ironically, the reason that some assert COIN to be some higher level of warfare is because those people misunderstand the root of our difficulty with it. They see inadequate training and conclude that our skills have been focused on a specific level of (less) complexity, rather than recognizing that our skills have been focused on one specific set of missions. If two grapplers prepare for a bout, but one bows out before the fight and a stand-up fighter replaces him, we do not say that the remaining grappler failed to prepare for the “higher level” of fighting. He simply prepared for the wrong type of fight. Likewise, our training thus far has been in preparation for the wrong type of operation."
Some thoughts: Outcomes Based Training is the key to preparation in dealing with the hybrdd threats we face today and in my view have always faced. Even grapplers have different styles and an opponent needs to be able to adapt to the differences in styles and techniques. His failure to do so will most likely cost him the fight "unless he is lucky" and in my view we have been all too often mistaking good luck for good sound strategy and tactics. The good luck outcomes breed compalcency and a feeling of success that in the end breed bad habits that reduce our efffectiveness in preventing and handling different threats.
Keep in mind I am coming at this from my perspective as a former Marine grunt and current law enforcement officer and trainer and in my opinion you can never be thinking in a deterministic way when it comes to conflict and security related issues at home or abroad.
Policies and procedures often take away individual initiative and that is unexceptable and counter to good security measures because the our adversaries are out Boyd cycling us while we are trying to follow some damn rule or procedure that does not meet his adpatation "we have not seen this before, what do we do?" Talk about "friction" and being folded back in side yourself and unable to respond.
Hybrid threats converge on us in a way that its easy to exploit in our open and free socieity because they do not care about the rules and they have the audacity to bypass them. Security measures and training should focus on developing adpative thinkers and decison makers who understand people and human nature and the signs and signals of danger (history, intelligence, patterns of behaviorand non-verbal communication, phychology) who are in constent conflict. This may seem simple or a naive view on threats and security. In the end understanding what to look for is the easy part…It’s in the doing that’s difficult. Our current security measures are keeping the wrong side (good guys) bogged down in friction and a slow decison making cycle. A big mindset shift is needed.
Thats my 0.2 cents on the topic. Thanks Zen for the work you do here its always thought prevoking.
January 5th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Sorry for the lack of spacing above. do not know what happened there.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Thanks for the Wired link. The jellyfish story is indicative of the real environmental crisis so often ignored by governments and celebrities alike; the ongoing evisceration of the oceans. I think that will be a bigger story than global warming (overhyped to the point of apocalyptic hysteria… thank you Al Bore!) in the next decade, since we still understand so little about the dominant environment on earth and what third world countries in particular now are doing to it.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Thank you for the link, Mark! I’m still hearing media commentators say that AM’s father called the CIA and/or the American embassy; ABC did a great job of discovering what really happened.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Fred:
"Policies and procedures often take away individual initiative and that is unexceptable and counter to good security measures because the our adversaries are out Boyd cycling us while we are trying to follow some damn rule or procedure that does not meet his adpatation "we have not seen this before, what do we do?" Talk about "friction" and being folded back in side yourself and unable to respond."
Well put. I actually hit on this in a later post: "The problem with training Soldiers on tasks is that tasks are situation dependent. Given this situation, you perform this task. Well, what happens if you encounter a different situation for which you have not been drilled on what task to perform? A Soldier cannot adjust to the unexpected if he only knows ‘what’ rather than ‘why.’"
GMTA
January 5th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Wow, break the SIMs means to go jihad. Have we heard that in rap yet?
January 5th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Schemlap,
From we have the skills, we lack the training: "The problem is our training methodology. For decades, training has been broken down into tasks that provide an 80-percent solution to most anticipated situations. I think it is fair to say that our current situation was not anticipated by the decision-makers and the tasks that units focused on were not part of any 80-percent solution for what we actually encountered. The lesson here is not that we need to become better guessers for future contingencies. The lesson is that we need to train in such a manner that future success is not dependent upon how fortunate we are in guessing at what tasks we need to train on. That means abandoning the non-professional approach to training and focusing on training professionals."
You make great points and your post, "We have the skills, we lack the training" is great as well.
I participated in a Adaptive Leadership and Outcome Based Training Syposium at West Point in August as a guest of Don Vandergriff and the Department of Military Instruction. They are making some great changes at developing the types of decision makers needed to meet todays rapidly evolving threats.
The training factors cognative and physical skills with the attributes required of good deciosn makers (there was very interesting discussion on what attributes are neccessary for a good implicit decison maker under pressure).
The focus is scenario based problem solving training, pen and paper exercises, table top exercises. up to and including force on force free play exercises and some simulation.
Also using the methodology in unconventioanl ways navigation, comabt first aid, and firearms classes and they get complete buy in from cadets and they are developing decison makers. People not afraid to communicate and interact with one another and collarborate to achieve effective results at solving numerous problems…Very interesting and powerful lessons are being learned and results from feedback in training and from combat veterans verifying outcomes based trainings effectiveness.
We (military and law enforcement) often focus on efficiency over effectiveness when it comes to training and there in lies a weakness. The focus should be on effectiveness. Numbers pushed through task, conditions and standards programs means nothing when whats learned cannot be applied effectively on the street at home or abroad.
This is great stuff and it needs to reach all who are in the position of keeping this country safe.
January 5th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Fred,
Are there any materials about, or from, that symposium available online? Sounds like good stuff.
January 5th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Schmedlap,
Reach out to me at fred@lesc.net ihave some pdf and powerpoints I can share.
January 6th, 2010 at 4:24 am
Sir Fred,
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I need to take a closer look at this Outcomes Based Training – I’m curious to see if there is any intellectual connection with the original outcomes based education movement in public ed during the 80’s and early 90’s. If you have PDFs I’d like to take a read if you do not mind – zenpundit@hotmail.com
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" in my opinion you can never be thinking in a deterministic way when it comes to conflict and security related issues at home or abroad."
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Deterministic thinking is good for technical and engineering questions. Issues of closed systems and so on. People systems are very complex and – arguably – demonstrate the capacity to be stable yet potentially unpredictable. Deterministic thinking will not lead to solutions or reliably predictive outcomes
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Eddie,
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Yeah, the Oceanic issue is counterintuitive but at 3/4 of the Earth’s surface it’s more important. My guess is that our understanding of oceanic systems is a) inadequate and b) not properly accounted for in AGW climate models ( anyone with geophysical or oceanographic expertise, feel free to chime in and educate me).
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January 6th, 2010 at 5:49 am
Do certain buzzwords just circulate from discipline to discipline? Outcomes based education in medicine (the quickest reference I could find, but people talk about it all the time along with core competencies.)
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http://www.medev.ac.uk/resources/features/AMEE_summaries/Guide14Summary.pdf
January 6th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Zen I agree. Copeies of what i have being sent now. Would love to know your thoughts after review.
January 6th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
"I think that will be a bigger story "
*
Eddie, it is the same story, the same environment. Take away the column of air above the oceans and it will boil
January 7th, 2010 at 4:14 am
Fred – will print out and read tomorrow – much thanks!