zenpundit.com

SWJ Blog has linked to Is COIN Dead. A discussion has ensued there and at SWC.

With quantum mechanics being used as a metaphor.

The New Physics: Key to Strengthening COIN by  A. Lawrence Chickering

….At the present time, most of what is being done for COIN is driven by old physics concepts, while many things we ought to be doing are understandable more in terms of the new physics.

One can see the difference between these two concepts in terms of the distinction between helping and empowering.3 The importance of this distinction is implicit in the widely quoted statement that T.E. Lawrence made in 1917 about the importance of empowering people and giving them ownership by letting them do things. -Do not try to do too much with your own hands,? Lawrence wrote.4 -Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. . . .?5 Helping is a powerful example of simple, Newtonian causation; it produces -concrete, measurable results,? which are the central concern of most philanthropy and donor programs. Unfortunately, the concrete results it produces are far weaker than the outcomes that result from empowerment and ownership.

Helping? is Newtonian and objective. You build a well, and the -measurable result? is a well. -Empowering? and -ownership? are post-Newtonian and subjective. You cannot -see? empowerment or ownership. These concepts have power when they are felt by people. Following Lawrence‘s statement, empowering and ownership are the key in COIN.

Empowering people, encouraging them to do things for themselves, shows the importance of non-local causation and results based only on probabilities. When a local community becomes empowered, there is no certainty what it will do. They will do things people care about-things they value. If you work in 100 communities, you cannot say what each village will do, but you can predict that some percentage will build wells, and some other percentage will build schools-and so on.

You know that empowering will not produce the -concrete, measurable results? you can get if the -helper? does the work, but when the helper does the work, there will be no community ownership and no sense of responsibility for security or maintenance of the -improvement?. With empowerment and ownership, people will protect a well or school and will maintain it. That explains why the well built by -an Arab? (Lawrence‘s phrase) is worth so much more than one built by -us? (the helpers).

The author has a solid point about top-down, outsider-controlled, hierarchically-organized aid activities cultivating an attitude of dependency, passivity or fatalism in populations that COIN forces are attempting to win over.

If we see symptoms of “welfare dependency” and disengagement from civil society in American neighborhoods with minimal levels of employment, high levels of violent crime and atomized social structures, as partly the product of intervention by social workers, police, state court systems and Federal programs, how much more so is this the case with third-country COIN? With bad people running around with RPG’s and AK-47’s? What would you, the impoverished and unarmed farmer of the village do? Stick out your neck? Or keep your head down?

Actually, an article at SWJ with an impressive list of resources on Mexico’s burgeoning cartel war:

Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico: Web and Social Media Resources by Dr. Robert Bunker and John Sullivan

The authors of this piece, individually, collectively, and in cooperation with other scholars and analysts, have written about the criminal insurgencies in Mexico and various themes related to them in Small Wars Journal and in many other publications for some years now. The Small Wars publications alone include “State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Plazas for Profit: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?,” “Explosive Escalation?: Reflections on the Car Bombing in Ciudad Juarez,” and “The U.S. Strategic Imperative Must Shift From Iraq/Afghanistan to Mexico/The Americas and the Stabilization of Europe.” Certain truths have become evident from such writings and the raging conflicts that they describe and analyze.

First, the criminal insurgencies in Mexico have been increasing in intensity since the formal declaration of war-penned with the initial deployment of Army units into Michoacán and Ciudad Juárez against the insurgent gangs and cartels-by the Calderón administration in December 2006. Over 30,000 deaths in Mexico, just over ten-times the death toll from the 9-11 attacks, have now resulted from these conflicts with 2010 surpassing the earlier end of year tallies with almost 13,000 total killings. While most of these deaths have been attributed to cartel on cartel violence, an increasing proportion of them include law enforcement officers (albeit many of them on cartel payroll), military and governmental personnel, journalists, and innocent civilians. While some successes have been made against the Mexican cartels, via the capture and targeted killings of some of the capos and ensuing organizational fragmentation, the conflicts between these criminal groups and the Mexican state, and even for neighboring countries such as Guatemala, is overall not currently going well for these besieged sovereign nations. Recent headlines like those stating “Mexico army no match for drug cartels” and “Drug gang suspects threaten ‘war’ in Guatemala” are becoming all too common. Further, it is currently estimated that in Mexico about 98% of all crimes are never solved-providing an air of impunity to cartel and gang hit men and foot soldiers, many of whom take great delight in engaging in the torture and beheading of their victims.

“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 calls “Masters” – as they rise in rank, they acquire ever greater expertise over a narrower and more refined and esoteric body of professional knowledge. This tendency toward insularity and specialization, analysis and reductionism is the norm in a 20th century, modern, hierarchical institutional culture of which the US military is but one example.

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.

Is looking for a few good men. Or women.

SWJ commencing phase 2 or our nefarious plan

….These are roles rather than job descriptions; each has a bit of an up-front project flavor to it with an enduring execution tail.  We expect you to bring some insight and vision to the position, and expand it in a win-win way.  We’re trying to frame these in terms where a palatable chunk of 10 or so hours per week is ample for success, though we realize that’s a wild guess and it is recon pull –  we’ll  evolve together to further lump, divide, or build out the cast of characters. 

The big roles we’re framing now are:

• Advertising Manager (Banner King/Queen) – run our advertising operations:  rethink our ad inventory as we go through site redesign; enhance our advertiser kit and the whole flow; outreach to, discussions with, and inking deals with advertisers; monitor campaign execution. You have audacity, tact and hutzpah, with the business, people, and operations sense to put it all together.
• Merchandise Manager (Schwag Tsar) – think up some nice small wars stuff that our folks would like to have, and find a way to get it to them.  Not at a loss, but we’re more interested in building a brand and a community than we are at selling cheap stuff to make an extra buck.  Deal with vendors, figure out some realistic inventory, and get ‘er done. Should have a keen eye for the difference between stuff and junk, and think end to end as far as the logistics goes. Amateurs talk t-shirts & coins, professionals talk fulfullment.
• Social Networking Manager (Grand Twit) – so we’ve got a token Twitter and Facebook presence, but we aren’t doing much with it.  There are some untapped capabilities there and in our user profiles in vBulletin. We haven’t done much in the way of facilitating local get togethers.  There’s tons we could do but aren’t because we just don’t have the time. You have the vision and execution ability to do more smart stuff to help more people get SWJ their way, and get together in ways that are meaningful to them.

We’ve also got some more focused gaps where folks with some specific talents can help us:

• Developer – if you’re competent on a LAMP box, we’ve got a few office workflow things we’d like to have our system do more nicely.  These are distinct from our in-process migration to Drupal and we hope they are discrete, interesting projects that can be feathers in your cap and arrows in our quiver.  If you’d like to drop a shoulder on some of it, send us a note for a short list of specific things we’re interested in.
• Graphic Design (Style Guru) – so with all this redesign and rework we’re doing, we need someone with a better eye than us fashion disasters.  We’ll soon be doing the CSS work with our site development team, and then there are a couple of collateral things that should synch up for that clean, consistent, simple, functional, good looks.  More Filson than Guggenheim, but we want some restrained flair and perhaps you’re just the person to dope slap us with it.  We’ve got to make our 2009 Rolling Stone hotness even hotter.  Maybe this design gigs stops at the look & feel, maybe you drive through that to be more of a brand manager than a designer with excursions into content and the whole IO thing – e.g. who knows what kind of junk that merchandise person is going to try to schlep that is just inconsistent with our “look”?  Your call.  But it starts with a sense of style.

I know there are many readers here who are techies who like the subject matter of COIN, national security and strategy, so I thought I would try to help amplify the message in my own small way.

Those who are “deadly serious” are encouraged to contact SWJ publisher Bill Nagle.