Recommended Strategy Reading
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
A short list of recent strategy or at least strategy-related posts and articles.
Steven Metz – The Paris Attacks and the Logic of Insurgency
Even before the smoke cleared from last week’s horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, people were struggling to make sense of them. Because the initial victims were associated with Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine known to deride Islam, attention fell on questions of free speech and whether it should be limited when religion is involved. But even if the belief that Islam is being insulted influenced the killers at a personal level, the al-Qaida strategists who claim to have directed the Charlie Hebdo attack had other goals. For them, the notion of blasphemy is useful propaganda, but their objectives are much bigger than punishing cartoonists.
In 2004, Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who went on to be a key adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and an architect of U.S. thinking about counterinsurgency, proposed an innovative perspective on what had, by that point, become known as the Global War on Terror. Islamist terrorism was, Kilcullen argued, “best understood as a global insurgency, initiated by a diffuse grouping of Islamist movements that seek to re-make Islam’s role in the world order.” This insight still applies today. To understand jihadist organizations like al-Qaida and the so-called Islamic State (IS) first requires understanding the core logic of insurgency. …
John Hagel – The Big Shift in Strategy – Part 1 and The Big Shift in Strategy – Part 2
Most strategies (strategies of terrain) tend to look from the present out to the future. Strategies of trajectory start with a view of the future and work back to the implications for action in the present.
Here’s the paradox: strategies of trajectory become more and more essential in times of rapid change and uncertainty, while at the same time becoming more and more difficult. But that’s exactly what makes strategies of trajectory so valuable. Most of us tend to fall back into our comfort zone and just focus on the present, leaving us vulnerable to the changes just ahead. Only a few will venture beyond their comfort zone. Those few who craft strategies to focus action today based on an anticipated future that’s quite different from today will be in the best position to reap the rewards of a rapidly changing environment. They will stand out from the rest of us who are scrambling to respond to the latest event and, in the process, spreading our limited time and resources more and more thinly.
So, what’s required to craft these strategies of trajectory? Five elements can help to make these strategies successful:
-
Challenging
-
Shaping
-
Motivating
-
Measuring
-
Learning
Global Guerrillas – Saudi Arabia Plunges into an Abyss
Here why this attack is signficant.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page