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[ by Charles Cameron — games and complexity, Joseph Kony, think tanks, need for a new analytic institution ]
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I just introduced myself to the Ethos Network — their motto: Collaboration, Trust, Moderation — a group of mainly UK-based mil, biz & creativ types a good friend pointed me to, partly responding to an earlier conversation about Kony on their platform, partly laying out my own interests…

And with a suggestion thrown in there that we could really use a new analytic setup of some sort, a point I’ll return to.

Here, then, is my introduction as posted there:

Hello:

A few words of introduction are probably in order, before I dive in…

You might say I live at the intersection of complexity and games, and work at the intersection of religion and violence.

1.

My interest in complexity comes from a sense that the problems facing us contains many diverse and conflicting tensions to be resolved in some sort of continuous, shifting balance, and that we as humans face them with a complexity of our own, the complexity of our individual tensions, preferences, desires, interrests, hopes, fears, assumptions, resistances and so forth.  

So both within each one of us, and in groups, we have a situation where many points of view, many voices should if possible be heard, taken into account, adjusted for.

As social beings, we need to let the voices of other stakeholders, other constituencies, other points of view be heard, so that we can move towards win-win balances — I won’t call them solutions — wherever possible.

As humans, we need to let some of our own quieter, slower, deeper voices emerge — and that’s the purpose of inward listening, meditation, taking a break, the Sabbath, sleeping on it, relaxing, reverie — to bring out some of the voices that add insight, to give the aha! time to develop and space to show itself…

And in both cases, it’s the voices that go unheard, the parts of the web of tension unattended to, which can come back and bite us.

So… two things.  

One:  I am interested in developing ways to map conversations that are many voiced — literally “polyphonic” — such that, as with the music of Bach and Handel (and hey, Dylan and the Band), multiple voices can be heard at once, held in a shifting tension, with conflict arising and moving into resolution as they do when Glenn Gould plays Bach or Eric Clapton jams with Billy Preston…  I have games I’ve designed that do this…

Two: I am interested in what we’re not paying attention to, to our blind spots, to the undertows of our own and other cultures, to the stuff we easily dismiss.

Which brings me to…

2.

I am specifically interested in the contribution of religion, of religious emotion, to contemporary violence.

Religious violence is obviously not the only aspect of violence — but materiel is easier to quantify than morale, and all too often we miss religious signals in others (and in those on our own side) which turn out to have been powerful drivers of conflict.

Joseph Kony is the example of “religious violence” that I’ve seen mentioned here, and given my interest in jihad — I’d been tracking jihadist groups since before the turn of the millennium — he popped up on my screen and claimed some real estate in my attention in May 2005, when I downloaded DFID Media Fellow Maya Deighton’s report in the then-DFID journal, Developments, in which she wrote:

The rebels’ leader is a religious fanatic called Joseph Kony, who hides out for most of the time in southern Sudan.

Kony manages to combine a heady blend of occultism, born-again Christianity, and most recently, a much-proclaimed conversion to Islam, with his campaign of terror and child abduction.

At about the same time, I dowloaded a Chalcedon Foundation file containing Lee Duigon’s piece, “Uganda’s War with ‘the Devil’” — Chalcedon is the late “dominionist” theologian Roussas John Rushdoony’s outfit, and preaches the imposition of the full Old Testament law of Moses, stoning of adulterers included, in the United States (and ultimately the world) — hence my interest.

In any case, it would have been Kony’s “much-proclaimed conversion to Islam” that likely caught my interest in Deighton’s article, and it may well have been Duignon’s piece that first brought Kony to my attention. 

I have tried to keep a wary eye out for news of Kony and the LRA ever since, and for my own purposes, the most informative materials that I have run across in the interim are the notes taken by LTC Richard Skow, published by the New York Times in December 2010.

I have blogged at least twice on Kony, once after Rush Limbaugh, an American media presence on the right, described Kony and the LRA approvingly as “Christians … fighting the Muslims”, and the other time to note (among other things) Kony’s connection with Alice Lakwena.

But Kony’s not the point, and indeed Kony’s wider context, with its multiple drivers in terms of resources, warlords, moral issues, the whole shebang, isn’t the point either.

The point is that I work a seam that’s very little noticed by western analysts, and that runs through the heart of pretty much every insurgency and terrorist movement in recent memory.

The LTTE, for what it’s worth, included.

3.

Al-Qaida’s the prime example of course — but when Omam Hammami’s made his video presentation just last week, how many people noticed that he defined jihad as an act of worship?  And who had an inkling of what that meant?

That was the topic of my most recent blog-post on Zenpundit, but it’s just the most recent instance of a trend that’s both significant and significantly under-appreciated.  It’s in one of our blind spots.

There are times when I’m hugely thankful for the work of people like Nelly Lahoud at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point — her preliminary report on the “history of jihad” written by bin Laden’s personal secretary came out today — or Will McCants at the Center for Naval Analyses.  But there are other times when I’m equally frustrated, knowing how many bright scholarly voices with valuable insights to offer go unheard.

The think tanks are pretty much all heavily politicized: twitter and blogs are the go to places to keep up with cutting edge thinking — and still, just today, a rising star like Aaron Zelin can tweet about another, in this case Gregory Johnsen:

Is it me or has @gregorydjohnsen predicted everything re: AQAP/Yemen/US policy the past 4-5 yrs? Yet no1 in gov is listening to him. Stupid.

— and pretty much everyone who knows about Yemen agrees…  

This, too, while hugely knowledgeable people like JM Berger of Intelwire are in all likelihood too independent-minded and truth-driven to fit into one of those politicized tanks!  A place for bright, oddball, curious analysts to work without the pressures of group think or authority is very much needed.

But I rant!  And to get back to my own area of special interest – who’s paying attention to the Khorasan motif, to the idea that Afghanistan is where the Mahdi’s army will come from, to the significance of black flags (sometimes Mahdist signals, sometimes “just a cigar”), to the end game in Jerusalem — and for that matter to the notion, likewise found in hadith and widely proclaimed on populist Pakistani videos, that there’s a prong of attack — the Ghazwah-e-Hind — that sweeps from Pakistan down into India, until the victorious flag of Pakistan flies over the Red Fort?

4.

Well, I’ve pointed you towards my own areas of interest, and I do want to indicate that they are extremely focused — that in my view they constitute one important and often overlooked strand in a much larger weave, a strand that needs to be braided along with many others into a larger picture that I make no claim to see.

I am frankly ignorant about what doesn’t interest me, and frankly a very quick study in what piques my curiosity.  And I learn — and forget — more with each passing day.

Any place where Oink’s friends gather grabs my attention. I already see a number of friends here, Greg Esau, Richard Hodkinson, Peter Rothman, John  Kellden, Bryan Alexander, Gregory McNamee… 

So.

How can I be of service?

So that’s what I wrote for Ethos — and one of my analytic buddies already sent me a comment:

There is def a vacuum that needs to be filled that intersects relevant research with a level of independence for writers. Something between academia and a think tank.

I think that’s an important issue — but it shouldn’t remain at the issue level, it should be acted on.

Any ideas about that?

Rei Tang, who I had the pleasure of meeting and breaking bread with at the last Boyd & Beyond Conference, is guest-posting at Rethinking Security on a topic dear to my heart, presidential national security decision making. Mr. Tang nailed it here and I give his post a very strong endorsement as a “must-read”:

Guest Post: Essence of Decision (Part I of III)

“Maximize the President’s optionality.” Spoken in bureaucratese, this is what Thomas Donilon wanted to do as he took over the role of President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. Like most bland things in national security, this phrase is loaded. Graham Allison compares Donilon to Robert F. Kennedy who protected President John F. Kennedy’s options during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It speaks to how the president sees his relationship to the executive branch, his inclinations and limits. It speaks to how the president chooses and trusts his advisers and officers.

For a confident new president who respected national security pragmatists like Jim Jones, Joe Biden, Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, and Dennis Blair, making national security policy should have been straightforward. Obama and, former NATO supreme allied commander and marine commandant, General Jones created an open and orderly national security policy process—layers of interagency committees teeing up options to the National Security Council. Every department and agency would have a chance to say something. This would lead to good policy. But it ran into problems. In the NSC staff, now the “national security staff,” those who had been through the campaign with Obama had their access to the president downgraded. In the Afghanistan surge decision, the Department of the Defense and the military had boxed in the president. The more open the process, the more policy became stuck in the bureaucracy. In crisis decision-making, which takes up an extraordinary amount of bandwidth and which is politically delicate, bureaucracy can’t be allowed. 

The president came to find out this is not what he wanted. As the president gained experience, what he did want shows in the people who survived and thrived in the administration. They understand politics. Donilon, Panetta, Biden, and McDonough have worked on campaigns and understand the imperative of mitigating Obama’s political problems on national security. They’ve not only put in place the national security policy structure, but they control it—the information, the direction. They’ve expanded the president’s space to make careful, deliberate decisions. And to have “no leaks.”

Read the rest here.

It is interesting that in coming into office, President Obama, a deliberative and elite academic lawyer by education and temperament, set up a formal, Sherman Adams-ish NSC process befitting President Eisenhower and instead gravitated to a looser, more “politicized-personalized” model favored by Presidents Kennedy and (to a lesser extent) Nixon. This evolution suited Mr. Obama’s much grubbier, bareknuckles experience from his early days as a cog in Chicago’s Democratic Daley Machine, where politics is king and the ur-Rules are “Don’t back no losers” and “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent”.

A president always gets the NSC he wants but very seldom the NSC his office deserves. A corollary to this is that a totally dysfunctional NSC is no bar to having foreign policy success. During the Nixon administration, when Henry Kissinger was National Security Adviser, the machiavellian NSC decision process with the various principals was less in need of an orderly manager than a competent psychiatrist ( and this was, at times, seriously considered!); yet the co-dependent partnership between Nixon and Kissinger yielded numerous strokes of brilliance and strategic coup d’oeil in foreign policy.

The statutory requirements of the NSC are skeletal, which permits every POTUS flesh out the system he desires by selection of personnel and the initial executive orders issued to guide the business and interagency work of the NSC.  A president who feels uncomfortable with picking qualified “outsiders” -i.e. academic stars (Kissinger, Brzezinski) will have an NSC that is going to rely heavily upon foreign service officers, military officers and IC personnel “on loan” or after retirement from their perspective departments and agencies.  This will not be an NSC that will be apt to challenge bureaucratic conventional wisdom when preparing option papers,  but at it’s best this kind of NSC can be an honest broker and competent enforcer of presidential decisions because the staff is wise to bureaucratic tricks to stymie or delay administration policy. Eisenhower and Bush I were extremely comfortable with NSCs staffed by “professionals” and demanded very close working relationships with and between principals (SECSTATE, SECDEFENSE etc.).

An NSC dominated by gifted outsiders and political loyalists offers the opportunity for more creative and effective exercise of presidential prerogatives in foreign policy.  The president will have more options and a more critically thorough vetting of policy proposals from State, Defense and the IC.  As a result, because the NSC is trying to be both policy advocate as well as referee, the interagency friction and malicious leaking against bureaucratic rivals is apt to be very high – as was seen during the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations ( the last administration saw six NSC advisers in eight years, a factor of instability that added to the friction).

In either case, presidents sometimes attempt to “operationalize” policy that is particularly important to them from the NSC, which is not really designed or budgeted for such tasks. This has had mixed results, historically, with successes like the China Opening, bringing into custody the Achille Lauro highjackers and the operation to kill Osama bin Laden as well as political debacles like Iran-Contra or the secret invasion of Cambodia. The need to work through other bureaucracies makes the NSC doing “end runs” risky and vulnerable to hostile leaks and critical Congressional reaction (particularly if oversight had been circumvented).

To understand a president’s NSC is to comprehend how the administration really works.

SUGGESTED READINGS:

Brown, Cody. The National Security Council: A Legal History of the President’s Most Powerful Advisers. Project on National Security Reform/Center for the Study of the Presidency. 1020 19th Street, NW, Suite 250. Washington, DC. 2008.

Cramer, Drew & Mullins, Grant. “Lessons Learned from Prior Attempts at National Security Reform“. The Project on National Security Reform, Overarching Issues Working Group, College of William & Mary

Daalder, Ivo H. In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents They Served–From JFK to George W. Bush. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. 2009

Federation of Atomic Scientists. “History of the National Security Council 1947-1997”. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/NSChistory.htm

Dalleck, Robert. Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. Harper Perennial. New York, NY. 2007

Gates, Robert. From the Shadows. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. 1996.

Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. 2011.

Menges, Constantine. Inside the National Security Council. Touchstone Books. 1989.

[ by Charles Cameron — Leah Farrall on the state of counterterrorism ]
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Until recently, friend and blog-friend Leah Farrall‘s highly-regarded blog carried this header:

No more.

Leah, the former al-Qaeda subject matter specialist and senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal Police — Andrew Exum once called her the “Aussie goddess of all things counter-terrorism” — hasn’t been blogging a whole lot recently.

Today, the header of her blog looks just a little different. It now reads:

To understand why, you’ll want to read the series of seven posts she uploaded today under the new header.

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The title for the series goes with the first post:

When words have consequences: on labeling children “terror spawn,” and some stories and thoughts on agency …

The series continues:

II: The situation of children born into jihad
III: Bin Laden’s children
IV The situation of other children and the lack of options
V Understanding the pressures against leaving and the dangers it can entail
VI Addressing this issue without exploiting already traumatized victims

Leah concludes the series with a post in which she lays out a more general critique of the field, and explains the reasoning behind her decision to change the name of her blog:

VII A Personal Prologue.

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Caitlin Fitz Gerald (@caidid) was among the first to note Leah’s posts on Twitter, and wrote:

Confirmed: @allthingsct series is required reading. Set aside some time this weekend, start here and read all 7.

J.M. Berger (@intelwire) took the time to do so, and tweeted:

Just finished the entirety of @allthingsct’s epic series starting here and I cannot stress enough that you shld read it.

It is a great exposition of something rarely discussed, with broader implications as well. Also very human.

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Leah has written a moving and courageous essay: I commend it highly.

Addendum:

I have also invited Leah to write a guest-post for us here at Zenpundit expanding on her critique of current trends in counterterrorism, and she’s agreed. So that’s something to keep an keen eye out for, date uncertain at this point.

From blogfriend Cheryl Rofer as well as Molly Cernicek and Susan Voss at Nuclear Diner, – an event for those interested in nuclear weapons, science, Cold War diplomatic history, national security, strategic theory and American strategists:

Nuclear Diner Teams With Santa Fe Institute To Bring You Legacies of the Manhattan Project 

An excellent opportunity for students, grad students, historians and practitioners in various fields to participate here via twitter.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command, by Jon Tetsuro Sumida

This monograph piqued my interest several weeks ago, as I consider whether or not to re-read Alfred Thayer Mahan‘s classic The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783. I’m about twenty years removed from my original reading, and honestly wasn’t ready for it when I did read it, so much of what I remember remains a blur at best.

Professor Sumida leads with a Preface entitled, Musical Performance, Zen Enlightenment, and Naval Command. Sumida draws parallels between the performance of music and the artistry inherent in sound leadership during war. Boyd’s ideas with respect to harmony came to mind. Sumida also draws parallels between Mahan’s ideas and Zen and offers:

“Mahan’s writing about the art and science of command resembles Zen in three major respects — a pedagogy that attempts to teach that which cannot be directly described in words, the absence of doctrinal ends, and a recognition of the limitations of ratiocination as the basis of action under conditions of rapid and unpredictable change.”

After finishing the first chapter of Professor Sumida’s work, I was struck by how relevant Mahan’s ideas with respect to leadership development seem to be in harmony with ideas advanced of late regarding the need for disruptive thinkers (this links to Mark’s excellent summary). Sumida portrays Mahan as man convinced of the need for naval executive education that goes beyond the scientific and mechanical, and focused rather on the “deep knowledge” and “truths” found only in history (I agree). He writes:

Mahan “was convinced that constant and rapid mechanical innovation had upset planning and education to the detriment of command confidence and authority. He feared the consequences of a navy led by indecisive men, bred by bureaucratic routine—or worse, subservience to corrupt civilian officialdom—to follow rules or act politically.”

At only 116 pages, Sumida’s monograph would normally be a quick read, but I plan to savor every word—and probably read more Mahan.

More to come.

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.