Top Billing! Tempo Blog (Venkat Rao) – Hacking Grand Narratives and Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option 

While both of these are thought-provoking, strategic theorist types will prefer the former while the national security/historically minded will gravitate to the latter. An excerpt from “Hacking”:

….Going from narrative to Grand Narrative is a scaling problem. There are conceptual issues as well as pure scale issues.

I first encountered a good characterization of this individual-to-collective scaling problem in the philosophy of action/AI literature around intentions.

The classic Bratman Belief-Desire-Intention model is great for thinking about individual decision makers, but there are tricky problems when you jump to collectives, especially if you are trying to define things with sufficient formal rigor to support AI projects. Here is a good 1992 paper by Bratman if you want a starting point for exploration. I am sure there’s been more in the 20 years since.

Two solutions that have been pursued by the philosophy/AI community (I haven’t kept up) are the following. The first is to think in terms of the abstraction of “collective intentions.” The second is a trickier approach that relies on the distinction between “Intent To” and “Intent That.” The former refers to intentions to be pursued by the agent holding the intention, while the latter is a sort of supporting intention. I intend to make dinner tonight, I intend that X is the next President.

….The problem of scaling intention theory and notions of agency to collectives is one of the conceptual challenges for a theory of Grand Narrative as well. I am inclining towards the former strategy. I think it is safe to reify “nation” or “business” into collective constructs and apply archetype-thinking to them. So Uncle Sam might be the hero of the Manifest Destiny Grand Narrative that spanned the century between the Civil War and World War II. There are of course serious and tricky traps hidden in this process, but it is somewhat useful most of the time. 

Foreign Policy (Olivier Roy) – The New Islamists

A must read piece by one of the world’s noted scholars on Islamist politics

….The debate over Islam and democracy used to be a chicken-and-egg issue: Which came first?  Democracy has certainly not been at the core of Islamist ideology. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has historically been strictly centralized and obedient to a supreme guide, who rules for life. And Islam has certainly not been factored into promotion of secular democracy. Indeed, skeptics long argued that the two forces were even anathema to each other.

But the outside world wrongly assumed that Islam would first have to experience a religious reformation before its followers could embark on political democratization — replicating the Christian experience when the Protestant Reformation gave birth to the Enlightenment and then modern democracy. In fact, however, liberal Muslim intellectuals had little impact in either inspiring or directing the Arab uprisings. The original protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square referred to democracy as a universal concept, not to any sort of Islamic democracy.

The development of both political Islam and democracy now appears to go hand-in-hand, albeit not at the same pace. The new political scene is transforming the Islamists as much as the Islamists are transforming the political scene.

SWJ Blog– Disruptive Thinkers: More Thoughts on Disruption and National Security and Disruptive Thinkers: The PME Debate Needs More Informed Thinkers and Disruptive Thinkers and Opportunistic Leadership 

Too much here to excerpt. Just go disrupt your thinking by reading them.

AFJ – (Robert Killebrew) –A NEW KIND OF WARFARE

On Jan. 16, Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a 30-year-old Iranian medical student, was shot and killed while sitting in her car outside her parents’ home in Houston. Neighbors heard three quick shots in the night. Her purse and cellphone were found in the car, the engine still running.

No suspects have been apprehended and no motive for the murder has been established at this writing. But Bagherzadeh was politically active in the Iranian green movement and women’s causes, and the execution-style killing of a young Iranian dissident in the U.S. should ring some alarm bells 

Inkspots (Gulliver) – The real threat of hybrid conflict 

Gulliver is leveling a Clausewitzian criticism of the use of Frank Hoffman’s “Hybrid” concept (though not only his use of the term) – I have some disagreements but Gulliver also makes some solid points.

Nearly all wars are a strategic hybrid: a mix of violent action, diplomacy, and messaging, combining destruction, coercion, and persuasion. The modern hybrid war construct implies that future conflict will take on a more tactically hybrid character: that states will employ guerilla tactics in concert with heavy weapons, or that sub-state groups will use sophisticated weapons hand-in-hand with terrorism and insurgency.

You see, as Conrad Crane has said before (and as I love to repeat), there are only two kinds of war: asymmetric and stupid. Capable adversaries will always seek to capitalize on their own strengths and focus on our weaknesses. The hybrid concept simply tells us that violent actors will seek to diversify their capabilities and become less predictable by employing weapons and tactics more frequently associated with different parts of the sophistication and organization spectrum. 

Fast Transients–Boyd’s Really Real OODA Loop

Chuck Spinney -“The Afghan Disaster – Wait Till the War Really Comes Home” 

Project White Horse – Air War Vietnam: Remembrance at 40 Years – All Days Come From One Day 

Gunpowder & Lead (Diana Wueger)– The Growing Threat to Saudi Intellectuals: The Case of Hamza Kashgari 

Michigan War Studies Review –The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA and The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation

PARAMETERS – (Ralph Peters) In Praise of Attrition and (Steven Metz) New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency

This issue of PARAMETERS is particularly good.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: 

This is a must-watch video.

Dr. Charli Carpenter of Duck of Minerva has a visually stunning presentation about the impact of social media on IR as a discipline, injecting a burst of creativity and relevancy into a field that can be at times – well – a little insular and arid – and made it cool.  Dr. Charli also has commentary here. Hat tip to Dr. Drezner:

Top Billing! Global Guerrillas –Drones and Operational Maneuverability 

….Drones are currently in the process of being outfitted with insect mobility — bees to ants to fleas.  However, that mobility is of diminished use given the limitations on decision making complexity (beyond what’s required mobility).  

That decision making limitation will be fixed in the next decade, as inexpensive computing horsepower and bio-mimicry allows us to outfit drones with more complex mammalian behaviors (think rat).   

In fact, given that this decision making capacity will become merely a function of inexpensive hardware/software, it will become a throw away feature.  You can turn it up or down depending on need without any thought the expense involved.  

This implies a pretty efficient combo of dumbed down drones operating as part of a swarm, reacting to stigmergic signalling, and more rodent like behavior when operating as individuals. 

The Glittering Eye – Alien vs. Predator 

When I read this comment:

I don’t see it that way. I don’t think it’s about race, I think it’s about his status as a member of the Ivy League elite. He doesn’t understand “typical white people” but then neither does Mitt Romney.

my immediate reaction was “Yeah. 100% of blacks in America were raised by white people in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Carl Prine –General Discontent

 The emails began circulating yesterday, all extolling the brilliance of retired U.S. Army LTG David Melcher as a good example of the “disruptive thinker,” his Ranger-honed brain sculpted by the best of the Army and unleashed now as a titan of entrepreneurship, his eyes burning as green as sawbucks in the jungle of Wall Street’s night.

Well, can you blame them?  I know I can’t.  Their applause for Melcher’s bio arrives at a historical moment, one that finds too many current and former soldiers intoxicated with a bit of maverick humbuggery championed by Lt. Benjamin Kohlmann on Small Wars Journal  – an argument so clumsy that he, no joke, suggests that the best way to shake up the stifling complacency of the military bureaucracies is to send junior officers to business school, most especially the one at Harvard. 

….To sell the innovative fusion that apparently occurs whenever we link – again, no joke – “cryogeneticists with F/A-18 pilots,” Kohlmann rambles on about fripperies as diverse as the iPhone, its godfather with deep pockets Steve Jobs, science fiction writer Orson Scott Card, dead USAF Col. John Boyd, the Myspace of living USN Adm. James Stavridis, three-named mediocrity Joshua Cooper Ramo, then some jumbled half-thoughts about crowdsourcing, terrorists and swarming drones all designed to answer a question he doesn’t really ask:   Why do it?  Who already benefits from today’s hidebound bureaucracy? 

Granted, I don’t think that even one of Kohlmann’s examples of Harvard’s entrepreneurial spirit ever attended HBS, but perhaps their accountants and personal wealth managers did. 

SWJ (Peter J. Munson) –Disruptive Thinkers: Defining the Problem

Benjamin Kohlmann’s essay, “The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers,” struck a chord like no other essay published recently in the Small Wars Journal.  In brutal honesty, I have to say that the many sniping comments struck exposed flesh.  While an ardent fan of Kohlmann’s essay, I have to agree that his argument was more akin to birdshot at maximum range than a mailed fist to the throat of the problem.  Perhaps a better analogy is that his was a marking round lobbed in the general vicinity of the problematic enemy fire.  Whatever it was, it was a wildly popular read.  For all the comments on the article, the one that rang truest with me came from commener “Null Hypothesis” and asked, “What problem are we trying to solve again?”  This was absolutely the right question.

Kohlmann called for disruptive thinkers, but the real question is why?  And what are we disrupting?  We cannot waste time with harassment and interdiction fires.  We must define what targets we are servicing….

Infinity Journal (Frank Hoffman)– The Myth of the Post-Power Projection Era

CTOvision (Alex Olesker) –Fighting Cyber Crime with Transparency 

Wilson Quarterly – Pakistan’s Most Dangerous Place 

Recommended Viewing:

 Top Billing!  Zachary Tumin – Let’s tackle the right education crisis

Zach Tumin, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and co-author of  Collaborate or Perish!: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World is critiquing the Council of Foreign Relation’s recent report on “national security and education” that was very light on connections to national security and very heavy on recommendations for more corporate ed reform of the public school system (Largely because the task force was stacked with an excess of people who would benefit financially from such policies).  Tumin writes:

There’s a national security crisis in U.S. education. I’m no history sleuth, but it must have come on fast just after February 2010. That’s when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sent the last Quadrennial Defense Review up to Capitol Hill, with no mention of U.S. education at all. Two years later, in March 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice issued a report from the Council on Foreign Relations that declared American education to be so failed as to put U.S. national security at risk.

National security crises can arise suddenly. But education crises? Schooling kids is much as Max Weber once described politics – “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” You can lose a school building or a teacher overnight, but you don’t fall into a national-security-like crisis by mid-morning recess. You don’t get out of it by homeroom the next day, either.

American education today does feel like it’s in crisis. But not the one Rice and Klein would have us believe. Klein and Rice say the problem is: “Johnny still can’t read, ‘rite or ‘rithmetic.” They say tests and standards are the fix. And like George Bush did down at Ground Zero after 9/11, they’ve gone to “The Pile,” megaphone in hand, shouting the alarm. This time, though, it’s not Saddam and WMD. It’s China, Finland, Singapore and our schools.

….If we’re going to war, let’s get the problem right.

There is a crisis in American education worth going after hard. It’s one we can fix, and only a fool wouldn’t want to, whether its draped in the American flag or just sitting there quietly waiting to wreak havoc. Almost 1 million K-12 teachers – 29 percent of U.S. public school teachers – say they plan to quit within the next five years. Two years ago it was 17 percent. For those teachers with six to 20 years on the job – the heart of the batting order – 40 percent now say they plan to wave the white flag.

How do we know? Because Pew and Harris Interactive told us so last month in the 28th annual MetLife “Survey of the American Teacher.” Pew famously puts out the dullest, most obvious, least controversial survey findings imaginable. No one ever accused Pew of “rock piling” it.

But this was a stunner. Pay isn’t the issue. Safety is all right. Teacher-parent engagement is up. With collaboration between teachers and parents strong, teachers feel they have parents’ support and involvement. These are great soft indicators. So what’s the beef? Teachers feel they’re being asked to take a high-speed drill to a “strong slow boring of hard boards” problem just when the long, slow nurture of children has become all the more important to kids’ success. America’s teachers think we’ve got the problem – and the solution – wrong. Here’s what Pew found:

Read the rest here.

HG’s World– Thoughts on a Maritime Nation

The maritime theme that most often runs through this blog, and binds it together, is the same one that for over two hundred years has bound together the United States, and led to our success as a nation and great power. Due to our ability to recognize our failings, and self correct ourselves this path has led to a world more prosperous and secure, than any time since humans have existed. Our nation was founded by people who journeyed to our shores on ships, and then when divorced from Europe, founded a navy to protect our shores and lanes of commerce. 

….The recent decision by President Obama to commit to a “Strategic Pivot” to reinforce our presence in the Western Pacific has left the Navy with hard choices to do more with less, as it plans to retire 16 ships and now 7 more cruisers and 2 amphibious ships next year. Some in Congress have begun to question the logic and soundness of the Navy’s decision. This topic has spread to the influential naval centric blog of Information Dissemination, where this post generated lively debate. Amid the plans for pivoting to Asia is a rather large fly in the ointment named Iran. Reading the “Tea Leaves” tends support the phrase, plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

Thomas PM Barnett – WPR’s The New Rules: In Tough Times, America’s ‘Dirty Harry’ Streak Re-Emerges  

President Barack Obama has presented himself as the ender of wars. Moreover, where the preceding administration went heavy with its military power, the Obama administration goes laparoscopically light. And as if to culminate a quarter-century trend of U.S. military interventions that have all somehow devolved into manhunts of some sort, America now simply skips the intervention and gets straight to hunting down and killing bad guys. We stand our ground, as it were, on a global scale. Give us the wrong gesture, look, attitude or perceived intention, and wham! One of ours might kill one of yours — in a heartbeat. You just never know.

If that sounds like the resurrection of the “Dirty Harry” mindset, it has a lot to do with our still-tough economic times. As a nation and society, we have a long and persistent history of adopting a decidedly illiberal attitude when income growth lags. Jostled by hard times, we feel little remorse about dispatching those who transgress, trespass, threaten or terrorize us.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Why We Don’t Know What We Talk About When We Talk About Probability 

I will rephrase the previous two points, as they are nonseparable. 

Luckily, we do not use probabilities in daily(and less daily) decisions,

 at least not in the raw form presented in the literature -doing so 

 would have made us exit the gene pool.

To Be or to Do –Frederick the Great, Baron Von Steuben, and the Value of Practice, Practice, Practice 

Danger Room–Navy: We’re 4 Years Away From Laser Guns on Ships and FBI: Russian Honeypot Tried To Sex Obama Cabinet Official

Outside the Beltway (Dr. James Joyner) –Republican Stupidity Widens Gender Gap 

Chicago Boyz (David Foster) –Rogues’ Gallery: The Convicts of Early Australia 

What kind of person keeps $ 10 million in cash at home?

Top Billing! Maggie’s Farm (Bruce Kesler) – Bloodlands

….Snyder points out: “To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond human concern or historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap.” Stalin and Hitler had conscious policies to extract material gain from the people who they thought stood in their way. It was boths’ commonality that had each act so barbarously: “Both the Soviet and Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources.” Many perpetrators of the horrors, also, had material objectives or just were trying to survive themselves. Snyder says that the millions of deaths tells us as much about the living. “It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.” Snyder’s recounting of the murders focuses upon the – to them – practical objectives of Hitler and Stalin: “In colonization, ideology interacts with economics; in administration, it interacts with opportunism and fear.”

The personal vignettes that fill the book, along with the details of the scale of murders, have set every reader back on their heels. No one, no country, is spared the telling of their heroes or devils. Go to Google to see how the learned react to the book. Go to your own soul to see how you react.

Slouching Toward Columbia- The allure of the absolute foe

….The notion of the sort of absolute irregular war had its counterpart in the liberal vision of warfare as punishment of criminality or the neutralization of enemies of humanity writ large. The rise of humanitarian intervention and the War on Terror have been significant drivers of the revival in Schmittian studies, albeit more often by the critical left than Schmitt’s own authoritarian right. The modern U.S. preoccupation with absolute enemies could be posited from two distinct, but now interlinking ways of warfare and preoccupations of enmity.

Inkspots (Jason Fritz) – Ends as wasting assets: time’s negative effect on policy 

….One of the many challenges in developing strategy is in the interaction of policy and military plans. As the Grand Poobah of War himself said, “Policy in making use of War avoids all those rigorous conclusions which proceed from its nature; it troubles itself little about final possibilities, confining its attention to immediate probabilities.” Policy concerns itself with the here and now and what the instrument of war can attain for it in the near term. Beyond that we get into the conundrum that Payne lays out for us. Further, the onset of a policy which employs war as a tool establishes desired ends according to the probabilities of the day, from which the military derives its plans. And then a divergence encroaches: process by its nature maintains the policy’s original ends (possibly with some minor adjustments) while military operations must adapt to the enemy and the realities which it faces on the field. As subservient to the policy, the military thus applies ways and means, with input or allocation from the political class, to ends it cannot, should not, or cares not to attain if the mission continues for such a duration that the original ends become obsolete.

 ….In any case, we have an obligation to maintain our units at the highest readiness and to develop the skills and character of our young Marines and Sailors.  Like it or not, our services have adopted a culture and a reality of providing some degree of in loco parentis supervision to our juniors.  With that comes some “intrusive leadership.”  The commentators above, however, cite the blow to the concept of “special trust and confidence” and to the likely effects on morale as servicemembers are increasingly treated as suspects.  This is all true, in my book.  But it is not so simple as it seems at first glance.  This is not a blow to trust and morale solely because it is an imposition.  It is seen that way because it is just one more policy doomed to fail because it is based on institutional moral cowardice, risk averse thinking, and is part of a policy portfolio that is reflective of a lack of priorities.  I’ll delve into each of these, but the best summation came from an infantry officer friend of mine: “I get weighed once a month so I don’t get fat.  I pee in a bottle once a month so I don’t take drugs.  Now I’m going to to have to take a breathalyzer on a regular basis so I don’t come to work drunk.  Yet, no one is checking to make sure that I’m competent at my job and am not going to get anyone killed.”  There is a lot to discuss in this statement, but don’t start sniping it yet.  We are going to take a somewhat circuitous route to get back to the breathalyzer issue, but it all ties together.

….Tweaking the tactics on the ground in South Vietnam would have perhaps inflicted higher losses on the North’s invasion force, may have bought the Saigon government a bit more time, but to what purpose? Would this US tactical success have changed the character of South Vietnam’s ruling elite? Would it have made the people in the South willing to die to save the RVN government? Tactics comes down to the implementation of violence to achieve specific and limited goals which supposedly build on one another to create operational and finally strategic success. Violence has it’s uses, and war is essentially organized violence, but it is not going to build a political community. Outstanding tactical virtuosity still would not have translated into a US victory in Vietnam.

At this point the tendency of tactical myopia leading to grand tactical speculation becomes clear and the reason for it as well. It allows us to avoid what the real main questions are and what failure actually entails.

Abu Muqawama shoots it out with Hezbollah (literally). Hat tip to Brett at Marine Corps Gazette.

iRevolution –Crisis Mapping Syria: Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human Intelligence 

The Arabist –IN TRANSLATION: EGYPT’S CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF CONSENSUS

Registan.net (Christopher Schwartz) –Abai — Strauss on the steppe

That’s it.

Dual Top Billing!  New Criterion (Thomas Bruscino)- “The New Old Lie” 
Rethinking Security (Adam Elkus)- On the War of Art 

The former is the smart essay making the rounds. The second is the smart blogospheric reaction to it. Here are samples:

For Schwarz, this was Bierce’s greatest attribute: to cut through the phony cant of the war’s causes, “including the North’s smug myth of a Battle Cry of Freedom (still cherished by many contemporary historians, as it flatters their sense of their own righteousness).” Bierce’s cynicism was not just the result of a painful individual experience that allowed him to produce affecting works of art; it was an identification of the universal truth of war.

….This conceit has long been de rigueur among professional critics of high culture. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson equated human war to the aggression of gangs of baboons and sea slugs: “at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.” Only humans, whether they are Napoleon, or the Nazis, or Americans, justify their instincts in terms of “morality” and “reason” and “virtue” and “civilization.”

….Over the past half century, scarcely an American student has studied Great War poetry without finding out that Wilfred Owen produced the greatest poem of the war. With its horrifying depictions of the suffering and death of fighting in the trenches, his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” proved “the old lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Tellingly, we would be hard-pressed to find a student these days who has read “Dulce et Decorum Est” in its original form by Horace. After all, the Roman poet could not possibly have produced art if it contained such sentimental pap.

and from Adam:

There are two paramount problems with the dominance of strategic nihilism in art. First, it does not accurately represent the conflicts it depicts. While Ambrose Bierce may have mocked the Civil War, it was deadly serious for both the Confederate and Union forces. Whether fighting out of an idealistic loathing of aristocratic and retrograde Southern slave society or a desire to build a more perfect Union, war fever was an undeniable (and historically documented) fact. Wilfred Owen may have accurately depicted the horrors of World War I, but his writing only depicts one phase of the Western Front. World War I was a mobile war in the West in 1914 and 1918 and was completely mobile in the East. The African, Middle Easter, and Central Asian dimensions of the conflict are mostly unheralded. Owen’s experience, however, is continuously privileged over other and equally valid experiences.

SWJ Blog (Robert Killebrew) –Well, They’re Not About Taking Over the Government 

A few years ago Latin American specialists began warning the defense community at large that the Mexican cartels constituted an insurgency in the actual sense, though one that was strategically different from the ideologically-inspired ones with which we are all familiar. By now, the weakness of the oft-repeated response that “Well, they’re not about taking over the government” ought to be plain. Sure they are. The pattern of cartel corruption of local governments in some areas of Mexico makes that plain. They just care about influence and compliance with their wishes, not about traffic law and picking up the garbage at the curb.

Some still think this is only about crime. It is not. Considering the full scope of criminality and terrorism in today’s world, on a spectrum ranging from the local gangs inside the United States to the confluence of the cartels, international terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and criminal states like Iran and Venezuela — there are others — it seems obvious that what we’re seeing is a new wrinkle in warfare itself, consisting of the blending of the huge resources of the black economy (estimated at a fifth or more of the world’s GDP) with transnational state and criminal organizations that wage economic, cyber and kinetic warfare outside the bounds of what we have come to think of as “established” rules of warfare.

Nir Rosen –Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition and Islamism and the Syrian Uprising

Nir Rosen is a very, very controversial figure, putting it mildly. While I find his politics to be radically left-extremist, I can’t fault Rosen’s willingness to crawl through hellholes to report important stories firsthand, much like Robert Young Pelton, David Axe, Michael Yon or Robert Kaplan.

ISW – Syria’s Armed Opposition

The institute for the Study of War is the influential think tank run by the Kagans that, after CNAS, is the most closely associated with COIN and the “surge” in Iraq.

CNAS – Pressure Not War: A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria

Title is self-explanatory, author is Marc Lynch.

The Atlantic (Joshua Foust) –Syria and the World’s Troubling Inconsistency on Intervention

Commentary (Michael Rubin) – Mrs. Clinton, Leave Sri Lanka Alone!

(Hat tip to Bruce Kesler)

AFJ (Frank Hoffman) – A New Principle of War

Chacago Boyz – Chicago Send-Off, with Guinness, for Neptunus Lex and “Engineers vs humanities….”

Michigan War Studies Review –Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg and Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy

 Eide Neurolearning Blog –Metacognition, Math, and the Brain 

Ribbonfarm –Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law