The Strategist as Demiurge
“Genius is above all rules” – Carl von Clausewitz
“Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.” – Eric Hoffer
An intriguing, thought-provoking and frequently on-target paper by Dr. Anna Simons of SSI (hat tip to SWJ Blog). First the summary excerpt and then some comments:
Got Vision? Unity of Vision in Policy and Strategy: What It Is and Why We Need It (PDF)
….Moving beyond “unity of effort” and “unity of command,” this monograph identifies an overarching need for “unity of vision.” Without someone at the helm who has a certain kind–not turn, not frame, but kind–of mind, asymmetric confrontations will be hard (if not impossible) to win. If visionary generals can be said to possess “coup d’oeil,” then unity of vision is cross-cultural coup d’oeil. As with strategic insight, either individuals have the ability to take what they know of another society and turn this to strategic–and war-winning–effect, or they do not. While having prior knowledge of the enemy is essential, strategy will also only succeed if it fits “them” and fits “us.” This means that to convey unity of vision a leader must also have an intuitive feel for “us.”
[ For the readers for whom military strategic terminology is unfamiliar, “coup d’ oeil” is an instant, intuitive, situational understanding of the military dynamics in their geographic setting. The great commanders of history, Alexander, Caesar, Belisarius, Napoleon – had it]
The key concept here is “visionary generals” creating a mutually shared “general vision” of policy and its strategic execution. While military figures who hold high command – Eisenhower, MacArthur, Petreaus – are obvious examples, technically, it doesn’t have to be a “general” in immediate combat command, so much as the final “decider”. A figure whose authority is part autocrat and part charsmatic auctoritas. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill epitomized this role, as did George Marshall, the orgainizer and architect of the Allied victory in WWII. On a less exalted scale, we see Edward Lansdale (cited by Simons) or Thomas Mann, LBJ’s behind the scenes, Latin America “policy czar” during the Dominican Crisis of 1965.
Simons is arguing for finding “great men” of strategy rather than explaining how to contruct a strategic vision per se. There is a very strong emphasis here of successful strategy as an act of great creativity, with the strategist as a master artist of force and coercion, imposing their will on allies and the enemy to shape the outcome of events. Colonel John Collins, wrote of this article by Dr. Simons at his Warlord Loop:
Be aware that the following article is NOT about unity of vision. It is about visionaries who convinced a majority that their vision was the best available policy at a given time and place in a certain set of circumstances. Implementing plans, programs, and operations follow. Most successful visionaries indeed must be supersalespersons, because priceless theories and concepts otherwise gather dust.
I agree. There’s a combination of actions here – strategic thought, proselytizing the vision, competent execution, empirical assessment and strategic adjustment – that feeds back continuously (or at least, it should). While Simons argues her point well and draws on several case studies from India from which I learned new things, there is a flaw in one of her premises:
Take Andrew Krepinevich’s and Barry Watts’s recent assertion that it is “past time to recognize that not everyone has the cognitive abilities and insight to be a competent strategist.”4 As they note, “strategy is about insight, creativity, and synthesis.”5 According to Krepinevich and Watts, “it appears that by the time most individuals reach their early twenties, they either have developed the cognitive skills for strategy or they have not.”6 As they go on to write:
If this is correct, then professional education or training are unlikely to inculcate a capacity for genuine strategic insight into most individuals, regardless of their raw intelligence or prior experience. Instead, the best anyone can do is to try to identify those who appear to have developed this talent and then make sure that they are utilized in positions calling for the skills of a strategist.7
Mark Moyar concurs. The point he makes again and again in his new book, A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq, is that “counter-insurgency is ‘leader-centric’ warfare, a contest between elites in which the elite with superiority in certain leadership attributes usually wins.”8
Watts and Krepinevich are statistically correct regarding the rarity of strategic thinking and are probably largely correct regarding the effects of professional military education and the career path of most military officers. They are most likely wrong on the causation of the lack of strategic thinking ability. It is not exclusively a matter of winning the genetic lottery or losing it at age thirty, cognitively we are what we frequently do. Discourage a large number of people by regulation or culture from taking the initiative and making consequential choices and you will ultimately have a group bereft of strategic thought. Or possibly, thought.
As with most professionals, military officers tend to be vertical thinkers, or what Howard Gardner in Extraordinary Minds
However, if you educate differently, force officers out of their field (presumably into something different from military science but still useful in an adjunctive sense), the conceptual novelty will promote horizontal thinking, synthesis and insight – cognitive building blocks for strategic thinking. While we should value and promote those with demonstrated talent for strategic thinking we can also do a great deal more to educate our people to be good strategists.
August 7th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
This all sounds like the Führerprinzip to me.
For a counter-argument, involving Napoleon, read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In particular, read his discussion of why Napoleon failed to commit the Old Guard at Borodino; but – I am sorry – you really will have to read the whole thing.
Unfortunately, you probably also should read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment also. Raskolnikov basically was a visionary leader wannabe.
August 7th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Dr. Simmon’s article is interesting in that it uses KPS Gill as one positive example to study. A controversial figure to say the least! (My family is from the state carved out of the Punjab in 1967: a portion that was Hindu and hindi-speaking versus Sikh and punjabi-speaking. And yet the castes overlap so that growing up I heard of "mixed" Hindu-Sikh marriages that were okay because the caste or region (clan?) was the same. But like a lot of that part of the world, life is very different for the educated city-dwellers and these very same people are often confused about the rural parts of their own country.
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I often wonder if we in the States make major strategic mistakes because our "elite" fuse intellectually with an overseas "elite" within the halls of academe and the beltway? (Am I being to0 conspiratorial? I don’t think so, I’m simply wondering about how ideas are absorbed and transmitted.
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Witness Cameron, his plain speaking, and the absurd public theater surrounding his diplomatic walkback. One of these days we will learn that the best way to deal with things is to speak the truth. In a world of global communications and global audiences, saying what you really think – frankly and plainly – may be the most brilliant twist of all….In fact, Dr. Simmons states that KPS Gill as a policeman had a unique knack of cornering criminals in their lies. Our diplomats in DC and London and Brussels might find that frankness is one of the best counters to diplomatic duplicity. Well, provided that we in DC or London or Brussels were interested in the truth. How sad that people that claim they’d like to help others instead end up supporting corrupt regimes in an attempt at stability or somesuch. No wonder some people hate us or roll their eyes at our "we are here to help you" rhetoric. We’ve learned nothing.
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– Madhu
August 7th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Oh, I did proofread but I still missed all the typos. I am tired. And I promised myself after my latest Abu M brouhaha that I’d rest properly and avoid these blogs….Sigh. This blog and CB and SWJ are like crack for my brain.
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– Madhu
August 7th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
I got a bit of that wrong above. I know it’s Wikipedia, but it’s not a bad introduction:
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"Haryana state was formed on 1 November 1966, on the recommendation of the Sardar Hukam Singh Parliamentary Committee. The formation of this committee was announced in the Parliament on 23 September 1965. On 23 April 1966, acting on the recommendation of the Hukam Singh Committee, the Indian government set up the Shah Commission under the chairmanship of Justice J. C. Shah, to divide and set up the boundaries of Punjab and Haryana giving consideration to the language spoken by the people. The commission gave its report on 31 May 1966. According to this report the then districts of Hissar, Mahendragarh, Gurgaon, Rohtak, and Karnal were to be a part of the new state of Haryana. Further, the tehsils of Jind (district Sangrur), Narwana (district Sangrur), Naraingarh, Ambala and Jagadhari were also to be included. The commission recommended that Tehsil Kharar (including Chandigarh) should be a part of Haryana.[15]The city of Chandigarh, and a Punjabi-speaking area of district Rupnagar were made a Union Territory serving as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. According to the Rajiv-Longowal Accord, Chandigarh was to be transferred to the state of Punjab in 1986, but the transfer was delayed and it has not been executed so far."
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The wiki is a bit glossy and glosses over some of the more negative aspects of the local culture, especially the treatment of minorities and women.
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– Madhu
August 7th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
There’s a pentecostal church in town that ripped off David’s painting for its sign out front. We call it "Jesus Crossing the Alps".
August 7th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk doesn’t get a mention? No respect. That guy was a bad mofo.
August 7th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
"…cognitively we are what we frequently do."
*Great thought!
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I wonder…? Do we orient ourselve to what we frequently do, or to what we frequently think, and is there a difference?
August 7th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Reading the part about a strategic thinker needing to be made when they were young instantly made me think of ‘Ender’s Game’…
But, I am not so sure that it is lack of exposure to ideas that has lead to a lack of strategic vision on the part of our senior leaders. Slowly, I am becoming convinced that it is the notion of Net-Centric War that may be to blame (to use a very vague term) as well as massive discrepancy between the World’s military might and the US. To draw an analogy, when playing any of the ‘Civilization’ games you have to think exceptionally precisely to win in building your nation up to the dominant one. Once dominant, the game was no longer hard (at any setting), I’d just idly chose which Nation I wanted to destroy and do so, in 10 or fewer turns. Or, declare war on everyone left, just to give me a challenge.
The last 20 years have been much the same for the US. At best we’ve struggled to articulate a vision of our strategic goals, and at worst we’ve strait up said ‘I dun kno’.
Hell, it was seeing TPM Barnett in CSPAN back in ’03-ish/’04 that got me excited because for the first time, I heard someone putting it all together since ’91!
If the majority of a GOFO’s career was spent in those strategic doldrums of the 90s-00s, how good could they really be today, no matter how liberal their education? Tie this into a military which counts on its network connectivity to deliver overwhelming firepower and you have a recipe for disaster–hey didle-didle strait up the middle.
The best thing that could happen to American strategic thinking would be the loss of $100 billion from the defense budget, I am certain of that. It will force decisions, and then so too force precise vision of what we must chose to win. Rather than the ‘we’ll just throw bodies/overwhelming firepower at it’.
August 13th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
"..you have to think exceptionally precisely to win in building your nation up to the dominant one."
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But you understand, you don’t have to move precisely to become accurate? Accuracy is much more important because it is time dependent and not distance dependent. Accuracy is used for targetting, precision is not. In fact, precision is not important as long as the motion in time is exactly the same each time you target something.
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Precision will increase your ability to change directions quickly with accuracy, but if quickly is not important, such as in generational warfare, your only gaining in the short term, which negates much of the "vision" thing.
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Which just means that while you are moving precisely someone else has gotten there by working with the slop over a longer period of time. The difference is highlighted in the operation of a precise CNC lathe and that of an accurate manual feed lathe.
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This is something the computer will not show you, so it will probably not show up in a computer game. In real life precision is a luxury, not a requirement.
August 15th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
“Somehow they were able to do more than just absorb the situational zeitgeist and operationalize it. They successfully explicated what others could not yet articulate.”
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I would say they all had one thing in common and that was they were prophets, not something you want to say too loud in the modern world, but Dr. Barnett knows what I mean.
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These “prophets” could enter a movement, a distribution of energy if you will, and imagine where it started and finished. In between they could successfully predict where it was going, how it was going to get there, and what was going to happen when the movement reached its end.
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“Consequently, unity of vision refers to more than just the repackaging and rebranding of conventional wisdom or, as has happened most recently with COIN, the rediscovery of forgotten lessons learned. It is not a paradigm shift in the sense that Thomas Kuhn initially used the term.13 Someone who can achieve unity of vision doesn’t only explain reality in a new way, but figures out how to get us from war to victory and thereby foresees how to change reality, too. 14”
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As the author says at the start of this article, “Got vision?”
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“Or to put this in even more basic terms, if you do not already know who you can trust and/or do not have what it takes yourself to be able to quickly identify trustworthy connectors, mavens, and salesmen in someone else’s culture, it is doubtful that you will succeed. Arguably this does not just hold at the tactical on-the-street level, but at “god” level, too.”
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I wonder if the author is as clueless to this fact about what has been written in this article, as anyone reading the article would be. Such is our “modern” world. It would be interesting to see the job description for this, with or without the tin foil hats.