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As noted previously, I was fortunate to attend the National Security Seminar at the the US Army War College this year and wanted to relay my impressions while they were still fresh.

First, in terms of reception and cordiality, I have rarely experienced such an extensive and personal outreach as was demonstrated by the War College staff, faculty, administration and students. Every new member had a “sponsor” – a student, usually a colonel or Navy captain, who acted as a liason and personal guide from the time their plane touched down until the moment they returned to the airport. My sponsor, the former commander of the Wolfhounds, Colonel Richard “Flip” Wilson, whom I consider a friend, really extended himself on my behalf, making me feel welcome and a full member of Seminar Group 20. Most of the students have multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan under their belt and many can report the same for the first Gulf War, Panama, Bosnia or Kosovo.

The War College, the Commandant and the Seminar Group all hosted receptions and dinners designed to get students and civilian new members to mix and further discuss issues raised in the seminar sessions or lectures. At these events I had the opportunity to meet and talk to the leadership of the Army War College including the Commandant Major General Gregg Martin, the Deputy Commandant for International Affairs, Ambassador Carol Van Voorst, the Executive Director of the Army Heritage Foundation, Mike Perry, the Director of SSI, Dr. Douglas Lovelace,  the Chief of Staff and numerous faculty and seminar members. The New Members such as myself were exceedingly well fed at these events as I suspect the Army was attempting to prove that it really does march on it’s stomach.

The serious business of the National Security Seminar was divided into two segments, the talks given by distinguished speakers to the entire class of 2011 and the New Members and the Seminar Group sessions of approximately twenty students, New Members, academics and foreign visitors. We received a brief on the war in Afghanistan from the ISAF Chief of Staff, who was standing in last minute for General Petraeus who was called to meet with senior adminstration officials; and a very interesting concluding talk by Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose, author of How Wars End, which covered issues of strategy, grand strategy and the disconnect with policy.

  The National Security Seminar is run strictly on a non-attribution basis, in order to encourage candor and frank exchange of views, which handicaps my ability to discuss specifics here. I can say that my views on Pakistan ( which I compared to “North Vietnam” ) riled more than a few people – Pakistan is the only country in the world given 2 exchange student slots at the Army War College at the request of the most senior leadership of the US Army – and several students and faculty members took the time, outside of seminar sessions, to make certain I heard countervailing POV regarding Pakistan’s value as an ally. Other topics included, but were not limited to:

Defense budget cuts and force structure
Narco-cartels in Mexico: Insurgency or No?
Civil-Military Relations
Repeal of DADT
AfPak War
al Qaida and GWOT/US Strategy
COIN
Critical thinking and Leadership
Logistics
Libya and NATO
AWC Strategy Curriculum/Program
What the US public expects from their military
China as a peer competitor
Effects of ten years of war on officer corps/military
Illegal combatants and international law
PTSD
Battle of Gettysburg and Grand Strategy
Cyberwar
Differences in Armed Services strategy, command climate, discipline, leadership
The Arab Spring
US Global leadership and Economics
Interagency Operational jointness

Most of the discussion took place in the seminar groups, with Q&A periods in the mass sessions with featured speakers. I came away deeply impressed with the seriousness and insights as practitioners that AWC students brought to the table. The AWC strategic studies program seeks to broaden students who are assumed to arrive with tactical expertise and prepare them for higher command that carries operational, strategic and even policy responsibilities (at least in terms of interpreting and executing within policy guidelines). Many students were articulating ideas associated with Thomas P.M. Barnett, the “mission order” and “commander’s intent” style of leadership or Clausewitzian strategic premises during debates and discussion.

The National Security Seminar Week was for me, an enlightening and exceptionally enjoyable experience, one I would highly recommend to readers who may have such opportunities in future years.

The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War by Williamson Murray, Richard Hart Sinnreich and James Lacey (Ed.)

As readers of this blog know, grand strategy is an important and timely subject that speaks directly to the difficulty American leaders have had in navigating the ship of state in the waters of the international arena. The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War by Williamson Murray, Richard Hart Sinnreich and James Lacey (Ed.) and contributing authors Colin S. Gray, Marcus Jones, Jeremy Black and John A. Lynn III postulates what grand strategy is and explain from historical case studies how statesmen struggled to fashion one in peace and war.

The Shaping of Grand Strategy has a number of strengths to recommend it to the serious student of history or strategic practitioner:

Focus: The case studies are all anchored in the Westphalian state system starting with the early modern period of European absolutism and apex of “national” monarchies and transitions through a Bismarckian 19th century to finish with the West’s cataclysmic 20th century battle with totalitarianism. This gives the chapters by different scholars a sense of cohesion and chronological succession.

Balance: The Shaping of Grand Strategy gives scholarly treatment from both the theoretical, strategic studies perspective as well as the historical case study. I learned some things about Louis XIV’s Europe and the Great Britain of the Pitts and the Hanoverian dynasty of which I was unaware. Theory bookends history in this tome.

Nuance: Each scholar gives his subject an adult treatment. Controversial points are interesting rather than shrill and each author engages an impressive synthesis of historiographic material as they cover a broad ground in investigating grand strategy. Each chapter is sound and engaging.

Limitations, such as they are, to be considered:

Absent: Powerful non-Western case studies. The ancient world.  Revolutionary war (French, Soviet or Islamist insurgent) as a grand strategy. Geoeconomics asnd political economy as a foundation for grand strategy. 

Weak: Insufficient treatment of the impact of nuclear weapons and deterrence on grand strategy, which frankly deserved a chapter of it’s own.

If you are composing a syllabus for a class on grand strategy or strategy, The Shaping of Grand Strategy would serve as an excellent generalist core for the course, supplemented by cognate, specialist or subtopical readings.

Some things that struck me while reading The Shaping of Grand Strategy:

• Colin Gray’s distillation of the strategic dilemmas faced by Truman and an almost Boydian implicit explanation of what grand strategy is and why it needs a compelling moral power:

High policy does not emerge in a vacuum, though it can be invented in a hurry without much forethought when necessity presses. Policy requires a North Star for guidance that can inspire, yielding to would-be leaders the fuel they require to recruit and satisfy their followers

• James Lacey’s realistic and granular treatment of the relationship between military strategy and grand strategy in the WWII Anglo-American Alliance and his generally admiring assessment of FDR as a strategist vs. a critical treatment of George Marshall.
• Marcus Jones’ emphasis of the importance of the strategist himself and the uncertainty of decision making in his chapter on Otto von Bismarck.
• The drawing of historical parallels with today  by John Lynn and Richard Sinnreich as well as the investigation of the reasons for grand strategic failure of British appeasement by Williamson Murray.

The Shaping of Grand Strategy is a tight, concise and focused academic book that furthers the discussion of grand strategy by providing coherent and detailed examples as well as a readable an interesting analysis from which both the professional or the the student can profit.

Strongly recommended.

[ By Charles Cameron — apocalyptic movements, best readings, budget shortfalls, lack of support for scholarship in crucial natsec areas — and with a h/t to Dan from Madison at ChicagoBoyz for the video that triggered this post ]
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What with rapture parties breaking out all over, billboards in Dubai proclaiming The End and thousands of Hmong tribespeople in Vietnam among the believers, this whole sorry business of Harold Camping‘s latest end times prediction is catching plenty of attention. I thought it might be helpful to recommend some of the more interesting and knowledgeable commentary on Camping’s failed prophecy.

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First, three friends and colleagues of mine from the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, about which I will have a further paragraph later:

Richard Landes of BU has a text interview here, and a TV interview here. His forthcoming book, Heaven on Earth, is a monumental [554 pp.] treatment of millenarian movements ranging “from ancient Egypt to modern-day UFO cults and global Jihad” with a focus on “ten widely different case studies, none of which come from Judaism or Christianity” — and “shows that many events typically regarded as secular–including the French Revolution, Marxism, Bolshevism, Nazism-not only contain key millennialist elements, but follow the apocalyptic curve of enthusiastic launch, disappointment and (often catastrophic) re-entry into ‘normal time'”.

Stephen O’Leary of USC wrote up the Harold Camping prediction a couple of days ago on the WSJ “Speakeasy” blog. He’s the rhetorician and communications scholar who co-wrote the first article on religion on the internet, and his specialty as it applies to apocalyptic thinking is doubly relevant: the timing of the end — and the timing of the announcement of the end. His book, Arguing the Apocalypse, is the classic treatment.

Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph is a wicked and witty blogger on all things Catholic and much else beside — the normally staid Church Times (UK) once called him a “blood-crazed ferret” and he wears the quote with pride on his blog, where you can also find his comments on Camping. Damian’s book, Waiting for Antichrist, is a masterful treatment of one “expecting” church in London, and has a lot to tell us about the distance between the orthodoxies of its clergy and the various levels of enthusiasm and eclectic beliefs of their congregants.

Three experts, three highly recommended books.

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Two quick notes for those whose motto is “follow the money” (I prefer “cherchez la femme” myself, but chacun a son gout):

The LA Times has a piece that examines the “worldwide $100-million campaign of caravans and billboards, financed by the sale and swap of TV and radio stations” behind Camping’s more recent prediction (the 1994 version was less widely known).

Well worth reading.

And for those who suspect the man of living “high on the hog” — this quote from the same piece might cause you to rethink the possibility that the man’s sincere (one can be misguided with one’s integrity intact, I’d suggest):

Though his organization has large financial holdings, he drives a 1993 Camry and lives in a modest house.

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Now back to the Center for Millennial Studies.

While it existed, it was quite simply the world center of apocalyptic, messianic and millenarian studies. CMS conferences brought together a wide range of scholars of different eras and areas, who could together begin to fathom the commonalities and differences — anthropological, theological, psychological, political, local, global, historical, and contemporary — of movements such as the Essenes, the Falun Gong, the Quakers, Nazism, the Muenster Anabaptists, al-Qaida, the Taiping Rebellion, Branch Davidians, the Y2K scare, classic Marxism, Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven’s Gate.

And then the year 2000 came and went, and those who hadn’t followed the work of the CMS and its associates thought it’s all over, no more millennial expectation, we’ve entered the new millennium with barely a hiccup.

Well, guess what. It was at the CMS that David Cook presented early insights from his definitive work on contemporary millennial movements in Islam — and now we have millennial stirrings both on the Shia side (President Ahmadinejad et al) and among the Sunni (AQ theorist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri devotes the last hundred pages of his treatise on jihad to “signs of the end times”)…

Apocalyptic expectation continues. But Richard Landes’ and Stephen O’Leary’s fine project, the CMS, is no longer with us to bring scholars together to discuss what remains one of the key topics of our times. When Richard’s book comes out, buy it and read it — and see if you don’t see what I mean.

Or read Jean-Pierre Filiu‘s Apocalypse in Islam.  Please. Or Tim Furnish‘s recent paper.

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And while it may not see Judgment Day or the beginning of the end of the world as predicted, what this week has seen is the end of funding of Fulbright scholarships for doctoral dissertation research abroad.  But then as Abu Muqawama points out:

hey, it’s probably safe to cut funding for these languages. It’s hard to see Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world causing issues in terms of U.S. national security interests anytime soon.

Right?

So the CMS isn’t the only significant scholarly venue we’ve lost to terminal lack of vision.

J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of this blog and an occasional guest-poster.

Book Review: The New Digital Storytelling

by J. Scott Shipman

Bryan Alexander’s  The New Digital Storytelling, Creating New Narratives With New Media is an excellent, highly readable, and comprehensive treatment of storytelling in our digital world. Dr. Alexander manages in 230 pages of text to capture the universe of available methods, processes, resources and tools available to storytellers, as of 2010. His 36 pages of notes and bibliography includes an exhaustive list of websites and sources used.

Dr. Alexander aimed his book at “creators and would-be practitioners,” storytellers looking for new digital ideas, to include teachers, marketers, and communications managers. Whatever your background, he assures in the introduction, “herein you will find examples to draw on, practical uses to learn from, principles to apply, and some creative inspiration.” I can’t speak for those in the target audience, but as one with but a casual interest in storytelling, I can say Dr. Alexander delivered! Over the course of the couple of days of reading, I came up with about a half-dozen ideas and discovered my MacBook Pro has a lot more under the hood than I ever appreciated or used.

That said, Dr. Alexander warns that his book is not a “hands-on manual” on the tech media discussed. In fact, he assumes the reader will not “be a technologist” and the material is presented accordingly. He says:

“The New Digital Storytelling straddles the awkward yet practical divide between production and consumption, critique and project creation.”

The book is divided into four parts:

Part I Storytelling: A Tale of Two Generations

In Chapter 1 Dr. Alexander provides an unambiguous meaning to digital storytelling: “Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies.” The medium providing this review to you is my digital story about the book. But that is just the beginning; just about every digital device imaginable is being used to tell stories; blogs, social media, videos, and even in Twitter’s 140 character limit, storytelling genres are emerging [readers at zenpudit.com will recall Charles Cameron’s use of Twitter feeds following UBL’s death]. As Alexander points out, “no sooner do we invent a medium than do we try to tell stories with it.”

In Chapters 2 & 3, Dr. Alexander provides a history of digital storytelling in two parts; part one is what he calls “the first wave.” From foundations in the 70’s and 80’s (his reference to the 1983 movie War Games brought back memories) to the evolution and importance of hypertext. Alexander asks, “How do hypertexts work as digital stories? Users—reader—experience hypertext as an unusual storytelling platform. We navigate along lexia (“multiple readable chunks”) picking and choosing links to follow.” This point truly “clicked” for me; one of the pleasures of reading zenpundit.com is the ubiquity of supporting links and how sometimes these links lead to unexpected, but valuable adventures. Often I’ve landed in a place I would never have found if not for the first “story.” Alexander writes that Web 2.0 has allowed for “the ability to create content for zero software cost is historically significant, and now par for the course.” He points out with the ubiquity of hardware (both PCs and mobile devices) and the social element (social media, for example) a means of of delivery and an architecture are in place where potential storytellers have a low barrier to entry—to get their story out. Alexander includes gaming devices (mobile and console) in the review of the Web 2.0 phenomena.

Part II New Platforms for Tales and Telling

Chapter 4 is a comprehensive review of Web 2.0 storytelling and the fragility of systems existing today, but perhaps gone tomorrow. Dr. Alexander covers distinct types of blogs used in sharing stories; blogs are ubiquitous and the barriers to entry negligible. He covers epistolary novels and diary/journal-based stories and provides numerous examples. One example was News from 1930, which “posts selections from each day’s Wall Street Journal” during the early days of the Great Depression—in essence, a blog as a realtime history lesson. But as we know, the blogosphere is bigger than history, there also exists a market for various fictional stories which include reader interaction/collaboration. Also included are examples of character blogging (as Alexander notes: “Bloggers are characters”) where personalities are revealed over time in a serial nature. Twitter has developed into a unique format for storytelling, forcing the user to pack as much as possible in precious few words/characters. Wikis, social images and Facebook are also covered and explained in ways that made me think about “how” I use social media.

Chapter 5 covers in detail social media storytelling…and this is one of my favorite chapters. Alexander explains podcasts in a way that was accessible and in a way that made me want to “do” a podcast! A podcast is limited to audio, but a web video places a whole new spin on our ability to digitally tell our stories. Chapter 5 is rich in resources and insight.

In chapters 6 and 7 Alexander discusses gaming and storytelling. This may be the part of the book that was over my head (I’m dubious of the real utility of “gamification” in a meaningful/productive way). One sentence did jump off the page: “One key aspect of game-based storytelling is the immersion of the player in the story’s environment.” Indeed, “intimacy” is an enormous missing ingredient in more than storytelling and absolutely necessary in proficiency in just about any endeavor. One other sentence made a big impression: “Children also learn a deep secret about art, which is that the less detailed the representation of a character, the easier it is for us to identify with him or her.” I believe guys like the internet Oatmeal guy and the creator of Zen’s recent post  have figured out this phenomena isn’t limited to children.

Part III Combinatorial Storytelling; or, The Dawn of New Narrative Forms

Chapters 8 through 11 covers the networked book, mobile devices, and alternate reality games. The networked book resonated with me because of something from my distant career on submarines (early 80’s); we would write a story where periodically storytellers would add a sentence and half to an evolving text. The results were always amusing and never predictable. Networked books sound very similar to our collaborative efforts 30 years ago, but with the ubiquity of digital tools, opportunities abound. For example “transmedia storytelling,” where “story content is distributed across multiple sites and media; the movie trilogy, an anthology of animated films, comics, computer games, a massively multiplayer online game, Web content, and additional DVD content.” This dispersion of story content and the variety of venues allows users a more “immersive experience”—-the intimacy Alexander described earlier. Mobile devices are literally changing just about every aspect of our world from political meetings, classrooms, clinics “now that those present can hit the Web for fact checking or peer support.” An excellent recent example was the squashed attempt of the United States Naval Institute’s board to change the organization’s mission. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were used to get the word out to members who took action. New tablet devices will continue to drive this phenomena. Alexander’s treatment of alternate reality games revealed “worlds” created with our world by game participants of such products as Second Life.

Part IV Building Your Story

In the final chapters, Dr. Alexander provides example of “how to” build a digital story, using the classic Center for Digital Storytelling workshop model. For me, this was the most thought-provoking section. The description of how a workshop is conducted, the questions used to prompt creative/insightful “story-able” thought is worth the price of the book. Alexander inventories the software available for audio, images, video editing, publication, concept mapping, and other production tools. This inventory of tools describes the appropriateness of each with respect to the level of experience of the storyteller. Digital storytelling in education is covered in Chapter 14 and is a rich resource for parents and educators who want to leverage the digital world.

The New Digital Storytelling should be the standard guide for anyone who wants to use all the new digital gadgets available to tell their story; this book is an excellent one-stop resource. I plan to use what I’ve learned in the expansion of my family tree history to an A/V platform and have already built a to-do list to get started.

One closing thought; the irony isn’t lost that this “book” about digital storytelling is made of paper, glue, and ink. I can only imagine what an adventure this would be if presented digitally where all the links were connected…a digital story on how to tell digital stories.

The New Digital Storytelling comes with my highest recommendation. Get this book, use those tools, and tell your stories.

Aaron Ellis at Egremont, the blog of the Tory Reform Group, has taken a liking to my previous post, Time for a Grand Strategy Board? and decided that the time might be right for Britain:

Should the UK institutionalise its Wise Men?

Ever since the end of the Cold War, this country has found it hard to think strategically. A parliamentary report last year stated, “We have simply fallen out of the habit”. It has also befallen the United States and both our foreign policies have suffered from similar problems. The ‘Big Picture’ is being obscured as policies such as humanitarian intervention and promotion of democracy take the place of grand strategy.

Governments have also found it hard to implement their chosen policies because of the lack of proper strategy – the sort that links ends, ways and means. This has been the case for military action, as we are witnessing in Libya.

The lack of any overarching ideas about our role and our interests has led to an incoherent foreign policy, as competing departments pursue contradictory policies even within the same country.

The problem is partly institutional. Jim Scopes, a former director of strategy at HM Revenue & Customs, has written that current reward and promotion mechanisms in the Civil Service “favour reactive (problem-solving) behaviour rather than proactive (strategic) approaches.” The Public Administration Committee has found that “the ability of the military and the Civil Service to identify those people who are able to operate and think at the strategic level is poor.” As I wrote last month, the makeup of government institutions is not the only factor in making strategies but it is an important one. The world is so unstable right now that it is essential for policymakers to understand the global environment if they are to form a sensible foreign policy – yet the structure of governments influences how they see the world.

If governments are filled with officials more comfortable with solving immediate problems then foreign policy will be reactive and short-termist. We need people to take the longer view…

Read the rest here.

There’s an interesting symmetry here, in the effort to improve the strategic capacity of respectively the United States and the United Kingdom, that derive from the differences in their Constitutional arrangements and national security cultures.

Britain has operated for centuries with an unwritten Constitution and Cabinet government. While these phrases are much more historically complex than meets the eye, the power relationships of Monarch, Houses of Parliament, electorate, peerage, bureaucracy and Party having evolved considerably over time, we can simplify things by stating that the cardinal virtue of the British system was flexibility, to adapt to circumstances. In a crisis, power could rapidly flow to the minister best suited to deal with the trouble at hand and the lack of institutional structures helped ensure that once the crisis had ebbed, concentrated power would just as rapidly dissipate.

The United States, by contrast, has a written Constitution and a Federal government, which while also undergoing historical evolution, is characterized by restraint. Friction is engineered into the American system to thwart or deter concentrations of power and circumscribe it’s exercise within defined parameters . Except in rare instances of overwhelming national consensus, new activities by the US government require the Congress to establish formal institutions that will then fall within the natural gridlock of checks and balances that is the American system.

Ironically, in remediating the lack of strategic vision on both sides of the Atlantic, a Grand Strategy Board would represent an institutionalization of strategy by the British, whose flexible system is in need of a long term, disciplined, focus and a strategic advisory lobby for the Americans, whose more rigid political system periodically requires blue ribbon commissions, panels, study groups and boards to break our habitual political deadlocks.