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Top Billing! Adam Elkus – Do Ideas Matter? A Clausewitzian Case Study

This article is, in my opinion, Adam’s finest work as a writer and strategic thinker. It even merited an enthusiastic and deserved “Excellent article. We need more like this!” comment from arch-clausewitzian defense consultant Wilf Owen.  Elkus asks sophisticated questions of competing interpretations of CvC and applies the understanding to analyze the cognitive culture of the defense community. Highly recommended.

The leaked Quadrennial Defense Review Report merits a look.

Metamodern – The importance of seeing what isn’t there

This is also a stellar post IMHO:

….Absence-detection boosts the growth of shared human knowledge in at least three ways:

Development of knowledge: Generally, for shared knowledge to grow, someone must invest effort to develop a novel idea into something more substantial (resulting in a blog post, a doctoral dissertation, or whatever). A potential knowledge-creator may need some degree of confidence that the expected result doesn’t already exist. Better absence-detection can help build that confidence – or drop it to zero and abort a costly duplication.

Validation of knowledge: For shared knowledge to grow, something that looks like knowledge must gain enough credibility to be treated as knowledge. Some knowledge is born with credibility, inherited from a credible source, yet new knowledge, supported by evidence, can be discredited by arguments backed by nothing but noise. A crucial form of evidence for a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence against it.

Destruction of anti-knowledge: Shared knowledge can also grow through removal of of anti-knowledge, for example, by discrediting false ideas that had displaced or discredited true ones. Mirroring validation, a crucial form of evidence against the credibility of a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence for it.

Charles Cameron at SmartMobs – A most remarkable conversation

….Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, has twice quoted Will McCants and Jarret Brachman’s Stealing al-Qaida’s Playbook report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, once in a video and once in his book, The Exoneration. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi too has cited material from the CTC, comparing it favorably to that of his challengers within the jihadist environment…

Jeff Carr – Don’t be a Cyberista. We can’t afford it.

….You may have heard the term “Fashionista”; i.e., people devoted to the creations of a select group of fashion designers and who only wear their designs. I have adapted the term to reflect what I’m seeing happen in Washington DC as well as in major U.S. corporations. Decision makers are being swayed by whatever novel term, concept, or strategy is popular at the moment. Right now that term is APT (Advanced Persistant Threat). Tomorrow it will be something else. And the politician, policy maker, General, and C-level executive who makes an information security decision based solely on what’s hot at the moment is the cyber equivalent of a slave to fashion – a “Cyberista”.

Abu Muqawama – Quants and COIN

A little quantitative analysis goes a long way 😉

So the quants, not content with mucking up the financial world, have turned their attention to the dynamics of irregular war. I may be a PECOTA guy when it comes to baseball, but I am wary of many quantitative efforts made to “explain” the dynamics of war. Strategic studies scholars I admire like Steve Biddle show the utility of quantitative analysis in their own work, and Steve in particular makes a strong case for why policy papers and academic research backed up by quantitative analysis have more of an impact than do papers based on strictly qualitative or theoretical work. But I think the pressure PhD students and junior professors in political science and international relations feel to check the three magic boxes — qualitative, quantitative and theoretical — when writing their dissertations and papers has contributed to the growing irrelevance of their fields in policy discussions. You shouldn’t need two semesters of statistics to understand a policy paper on strategy or military operations. Acquisitions or budgeting, fine, but neither this book nor this book nor this book nor this book — all enduring classics in the field of strategic studies — rely on quantitative analysis

Speaking of quants…..

Registan.net (Joshua Foust, Drew Conway, Thomas Zeitzoff) – A comment on `Common ecology quantifies human insurgency’

….In reality, this ecological model can only be considered one of several competing theories to describe the dataset. BGDSJ try to preempt such criticis by saying, “any competing theory would also need to replicate the results.” But creating a model to fit one’s data is an inversion of the scientific process, reducing the study to mere deduction. When respected newspapers write stories claiming ten percent of all Chechens live in South Waziristan, we must seriously question just how one goes about creating a useful model of behavior based on media accounts.

That was a very elegant bitch-slap, by blogospheric standards. Nice.

Dr. Von – Some Posts on STEM: Early Childhood, Part I, Where are we with STEM Education?,  How to Fix STEM Education , Summary of STEM Posts

STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics”. Von is a physicist, researcher, teacher, school board member and author of 70 published papers on particle physics and methodology of science education. He is writing here on the state of science in pre-K through postsecondary in the United States, where schools discourage inquiry and real science in favor of rote memorization, where science is not being sidelined entirely by NCLB mania ( as an aside, the dowstream effect of NCLB will be the steep decline of America’s edge in technological innovation and science research, starting in about 15 years when our science-lite, making AYP memorizers begin to matriculate. I guess we will try to keep importing foreign talent rather than developing our own)

The first item to put out there is a necessary change that is needed as far as what our pre-school children are capable of with regards to science. An article from Education Week deals with this, and a new curriculum designed for those 3-4 year olds. Keep in mind, if you have kids or young siblings, think about how they learn. They are scientists! They actively investigate everything. They experiment. They go through trial and error, learn from mistakes, and actually try to predict what will happen as they ‘play’ with new toys. They are natural curious about everything, and over time make connections between different items and experiences. They learn language through intense observation and build off of what others do. Through group play, they teach and learn from each other. Is this not what we want from our high school graduates?! Is this not how successful research programs behave and operate?

As is stated by a researcher in this article,

” “Most teachers will have a science area in their classroom, … and if you look on plans, you would see something listed as science but, in reality, there would be some shells, some magnets, and maybe a pumpkin, or a book about animals in winter,” said Nancy Clark-Chiarelli, a principal research scientist at the Education Development Center, a research group based in Newton, Mass. “But those items are not conceptually related, and they don’t promote children’s independent exploration of them.” ”

 

That’s it.

Some great posts out there this week. Picking a top billing was tough.

Top Billing! Information Dissemination – The Calm Before The Storm in Haiti

One topic kept popping up today among many observers: why is China kicking the State Department’s ass in strategic communication in Haiti? It doesn’t look good when somehow the Chinese can get a fully loaded plane into Haiti all the way from China before we can get many of our own search and rescue teams in from the US. I sat dumbfounded watching CNN this afternoon seeing a big red Chinese flag waiving in the background, and became frustrated when I saw a different Chinese flag an hour later behind an NBC reporter in a different area. There cannot possibly be that many Chinese in Haiti already, and they did bring humanitarian supplies and not flags, right? What the heck is going on?

This is soft power; symbolism and perception matters a lot to achieving strategic objectives in disaster recovery and humanitarian response operations. In the opening hours of crisis, the people are still in shock. The first 48 hours is the calm before the storm, and every detail in public communication and public diplomacy matters. I was seriously impressed when I saw State Department folks engaged in an actual conversation on Twitter today, but every element of government needs to get organized a bit better in the online space.

Galrahn has become so much the # 1 “go-to Navy blog guy” that it is all to easy to overlook the fact that he is also a very shrewd analyst for strategic and political issues. This post demonstrates why (and I bet Ray does not speak even a word of Creole).

The Scholar’s Stage – America’s Greatest Challenge — and Danger  

The people have no desire to govern America’s Republic. The oligarchy of good intentions maintains its dominance over society by claiming that its members are the sole possessors of the knowledge needed to hold the reigns of enterprise and state. This claim is for the most part true. Across the board, Americans are woefully ill informed in the fields of science, civics, and history. The worldview of the average citizen is provincial, the media he consumes even more so. There is little indication this will change any time in the near future. To the contrary, the population of the United States is marked by a multi-generational decline in political participation matched only by the nation’s falling levels of civic engagement. With pure passivity the public gazed on as its access to the conduits of power were cut off one by one; without raising a voice in protest the people have have seen their liberties stripped away. Those few items that can capture the interest of the citizenry are petty – popular public discourse is but a competition to see who can fit the most theatrics into a seven second sound bite, politics but a never-ending game of governmental “Gotcha!” Such is needed to keep the attention of a population obsessed with the flashy and trivial; the affairs of the country one has no affection for pale in comparison to the allures of the circus. Bread also has a part to play: in an age where voluntary associations have collapsed and economic disparity is growing, every trial and tribulation has become a problem best solved by someone else.

T. Greer is a commenter here and on numerous friendly blogs and has, if I am not mistaken, an academic background in classical studies ( correct me if I am mistaken, T. Greer).

SWJ Blog – A Certain Trumpet and The Green Beret Who Could Win the War in Afghanistan

The first, on General Maxwell Taylor runs against the usual professional historical opinion of General Taylor, which is influenced by the historiography of the Vietnam War, where Taylor was first an adviser to President Kennedy and then later Chairman of the JCS and Ambassador to South Vietnam. The second is about Major Jim Gant, author of “One Tribe at a Time“.

All Things Counterterrorism – Abu Dujana al Khorasani

Leah investigates a shadowy jihadi figure and serves as a springboard for a guest post here on Tuesday by Charles Cameron.

Kings of War – Are you experienced?

Hat tip to Schmedlap who also sums up the issue well in the comments section at KoW.

Tactical questions require somebody with tactical experience and know-how and not inexperienced kibbitzers ( like…..me!). Strategic problems by contrast, are not solved with tactical answers, as frustrating as that may be to practitioners.  Moreover, there isn’t a single field or domain of knowledge or graybeard guru that can provide all the answers for questions of strategy. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Musashi, Metternich, Jomini, Boyd, Bismarck, Liddell-Hart, Talleyrand, Kennan, Kissinger, Wohlstetter and so on have many answers but not “the answer” to crafting a winning strategy.

That’s it.

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!

Top Billing! Pundita – Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 2: Once upon a time in Saigon and Mumbai

A post of dramatic scope and fury as Pundita deftly sifts the shadowy underground of Af/Pak policy:

 ….Washington has yet to confront that the insurgency in Afghanistan, to the extent it exists, is miniscule and can be handled largely by non-military means. The major part of the fighting against NATO troops in Afghanistan is directed by Pakistan’s military and their intelligence service. As Rajeev Srinivasan explained earlier this month:

[…] Pakistan has clearly articulated its pursuit of strategic depth which, for instance, involves having a Plan B even if its major cities such as Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, close to the Indian border, are obliterated in a possible Indian nuclear second strike (after Pakistan has wiped out Delhi and Mumbai in a first strike). They want to regroup from Afghanistan and continue their jihad against India from there.The Taliban, of course, are Pakistani Army and ISI soldiers dressed in baggy pants and beards for the occasion. The fact that alleged seminary students (whom the Taliban are supposed to be) suddenly started driving tanks and flying planes is indirect evidence that they were trained soldiers.Therefore, Taliban rule in Kabul means Pakistan has achieved its strategic depth. Clearly, they have no desire to fight or eliminate the Taliban, despite the fact that some factions (such as the one from the Mehsud tribe) have begun to inconvenience Pakistan through a campaign of suicide bombings. Dead Pakistani civilians are considered acceptable collateral damage by the ISI, but their attacks on the military apparatus is a big no-no. They are clearly ‘bad Taliban’, and will not get any share of the spoils.[…]

Got all that? As to what to do about it: For a few minutes set aside al Qaeda, the War on Terror, and Islamism. Get into the ballpark of what’s actually going on in Pakistan. From there it’s a hop and skip to working out a better war strategy in Afghanistan. Reaching the ballpark starts with realizing that we can’t ‘solve’ Afghanistan until we confront what Pakistan is and what we’ve been supporting in Pakistan since (drum roll please) 1947: a form of feudalism that’s supported by a caste system.

….There’s no need to ask, ‘How did it come to this?’ We just need to look back down the yellow brick road. What started with a photograph in LIFE ended up with many American troops murdered in Afghanistan by agents of a U.S. client state — and with Washington’s only protest to engage in butterknife rattling at the client state. And, perhaps in the hope that two clattering butterknives would equal the sound of one rattling saber, London joined Washington in telling Pakistan’s military and ISI that if they didn’t stop blowing up ISAF troops in Afghanistan, well, they needed to stop. This tough line was followed by Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown fobbing hush money on Pakistan’s government to the tune of £60m, “which will include funds for education and clean drinking water for children, to be delivered before the end of the financial year.”

A collection of related links to the acclaimed “Ecology of War” paper in Nature by Boorquez, Gourley, Dixon, Spagat, and Johnson. No, I have not finished digesting all of this yet:

Nature: -“Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency”
John Robb: JOURNAL: A Quantitative Examination of Open Source Warfare, JOURNAL: A Critique of Open Source Warfare
Drew Conway: – On the Ecology of Human Insurgency, Response to John Robb Re: Ecology of Human Insurgency
Dr. Sean Gourley: – “The ecology of war” on the cover of Nature, Can there be a mathematics of war?, It’s more than power-laws and statistics, Quant Analysis and Open Source Warfare, 14 key features that define a successful insurgency, Mathematics of War.com

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett –Neocons are Alive and Kicking

Tom attacks the policy vision of the Krauthammers and Perles in this WPR piece but waxes brutally honest on the nature of China’s “authoritarian capitalism”

….Obama must spell out to Beijing the limits of America’s willingness to safeguard the developing world for China’s mercantilist resource-plundering strategies. And, quite frankly, Afghanistan is a great place to start, thanks to China’s recent $3.5 billion investment in one of the world’s last-remaining unexploited copper reserves. My guess is that, sometime just before his re-election effort, Obama will quietly deliver the following message to the Chinese: “I’ve held this line for as long as I can. Now it’s your turn to bodyguard yourself.”In the larger strategic sense, Obama has little interest in prematurely forcing this path upon the Chinese, since China’s underdeveloped capabilities would force Beijing to rely on a rapid expansion of its cash-centric form of “state graft.” Left to their own devices, the Chinese would simply turn much of the underdeveloped world into a sad, carbon copy of North Korea’s nationwide slave labor camp, self-righteously justifying such tactics as “non-interference.”

SWJ Blog – In Afghan war, officer flourishes outside the box

Good article. This guy isn’t following a recipe.

JFQ – “A Better War in Afghanistan” by Dr. John Nagl

Steve Pressfield – Interview w/Tribal Chief #10: Pakistan, Interview w/Tribal Chief #11: Pakistan, continued

More grist on our “ally”, Islamabad.

Metamodern – The promise that launched the field of nanotechnology, Molecular Manufacturing: Where’s the progress?, Basement development? Big leaps?

Dr. Eric Drexler’s nanotech series.

When the first million readers encountered “nanotechnology”

Now, over 20 years after the fact, it is often forgotten that a concept called “nanotechnology” first swept into the minds of a large, science-aware public quite abruptly, in November 1986, when nearly a million readers encountered the cover story of a leading general-audience, science-oriented magazine of that time, OMNI. A month before this, the term and idea had been known to almost no one beyond early readers of Engines of Creation

FSJ – “My Secret Police File“- Frederick Quinn

Remembering the halcyon days of thuggish, East Bloc, state security goons and gumshoes.

Dr. Jarrett Brachman – Jihobbyists: Come One, Come All, Ansarnet Jihobbyists Stumble Over Each Other to Respond to Me, The English-Language Jihobby Clownshow, Ansarnet’s Jihobby Orcs are at it Again, Making Jihobbyists our New Secret Weapon in Combating Jihobbyism, The Pros and Cons with “Jihobbyism”, “On Practicing What We Preach,” By Ansarnet Posters, The Fresh Face of American Jihobbyism: Abdullah as-Sayf Jones

Yes, this is an abusively large number of links from one blog but I’m highly amused by Dr. Brachman’s successful effort at annoying the Salafi equivalent of Trekkies living in their parents basement community. I’d like to encourage the spread of Brachman’s term “Jihobbyism”to tarnish the macho self-image of Islamist wannabes and fighting keyboardists everywhere.

That’s it.

UPDATE! Recommended Viewing:

Talk given by Dr. Noah Raford on complexity and strategy for organisations at the London School of Economics . I used the title “Dr.” because Raford has an academic-style beard.

From reader Chris, of the USMC. Ties in well with prior discussions here of the need for cultural-educational-cognitive renovation in American society and the marked inadequacy of the current elite: 

National Affairs -“Keeping America’s Edge” – Jim Manzi

….Reconciling these competing forces is America’s great challenge in the decades ahead, but will be made far more difficult by the growing bifurcation of American society. Of course, this is not a new dilemma: It has actually undergirded most of the key political-economy debates of the past 30 years. But a dysfunctional political dynamic has prevented the nation from addressing it well, and has instead given us the worst of both worlds: a ballooning welfare state that threatens future growth, along with growing socioeconomic disparities.

Both major political parties have internal factions that sit on each side of the divide between innovation and cohesion. But broadly ­speaking, Republicans since Ronald Reagan have been the party of innovation, and Democrats have been the party of cohesion.

Conservatives have correctly viewed the policy agenda of the left as an attempt to undo the economic reforms of the 1980s. They have ­therefore, as a rhetorical and political strategy, downplayed the problems of cohesion – problems like inequality, wage stagnation, worker displacement, and disparities in educational performance – to emphasize the importance of innovation and growth. Liberals, meanwhile, have correctly identified the problem of cohesion, but have generally proposed antediluvian solutions and downplayed the necessity of innovation in a competitive world. They have noted that America’s economy in the immediate wake of World War II was in many ways simultaneously more regulated, more successful, and more equitable than today’s economy, but mistakenly assume that by restoring greater regulation we could re-create both the equity and prosperity of that era.

The conservative view fails to acknowledge the social costs of unrestrained economic innovation – costs that have made themselves ­powerfully apparent in American politics throughout our history. The liberal view, meanwhile, betrays a misunderstanding of the global economic environment.

…. The level of family disruption in America is enormous compared to almost every other country in the developed world. Of course, out-of-wedlock births are as common in many European countries as they are in the United States. But the estimated percentage of 15-year-olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than in Western Europe, because unmarried European parents are much more likely to raise children together. It is hard to exaggerate the chaotic conditions under which something like a third of American children are being raised – or to overstate the negative impact this disorder has on their academic achievement, social skills, and character formation. There are certainly heroic exceptions, but the sad fact is that most of these children could not possibly compete with their foreign counterparts.As the lower classes in America experience these alarming regressions, wealthier and better-educated Americans have managed to re-create a great deal of the lifestyle of the old WASP ascendancy – if with different justifications for it. Political correctness serves the same basic function for this cohort that “good manners” did for an earlier elite; environmentalism increasingly stands in for the ethic of controlling impulses so as to live within limits; and an expensive, competitive school culture – from pre-K play groups up through graduate school – socializes the new elite for constructive competition among peers. These Americans have even re-created the old WASP aesthetic preference for the antique, authentic, and pseudo-utilitarian at the expense of vulgar displays of wealth. In many cases, they live in literally the same homes as the previous upper class.

Read the rest here.