zenpundit.com

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Human Face of War by Jim Storr 

[Zen reviewed this book earlier here. I had forgotten that I wrote a rather long review at Amazon after finishing in January 2010. Perhaps Storr will gain a wider audience as a result.]

Mr. Storr’s The Human Face of War will be I predict, a book studied by military professionals (and smart policy makers) for years to come. Using straightforward prose, Mr. Storr seeks to provide a philosophical approach to war—as he says, “In practice we are concerned so much with war as with waging it.” Storr goes on to differentiate between war and warfare; where war is an “issue” with history and warfare dedicated to methods/methodology. Storr rejects notion that war is art or science, and prefers instead to embrace pragmatism and limited empiricism. He points out correctly: “Pragmatism has obvious application to warfare. A significant aspect of warfare is `a process of trial and error; seeing what wins and exploiting it.” Storr continues that “empiricism is not just trial and error: it is a logical process based on structuring observed facts.” What “works” will suggest a way ahead. 

Storr uses broad themes of what has worked and what has not worked in military history by explaining the nature of combat and tools and models available to the practitioner. He uses Clausewitz’s “dialectic of aims and means” in conjunction with Systems Theory to describe the holistic nature of military units; where effective/efficient output is dependent on input—where a good outcome is “winning” (as Storr repeatedly observes throughout the book, armies aren’t paid to come in second). Hence, organization of military units is fundamental; efficient/effective organizations are more likely to succeed. He observes: “Cohesion and collective performance indicate the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There is a systemic effect, and we should see armed forces as systems.” 

Storr is a proponent of forcing decision making to the folks on the ground using brief and succinct communications. His chapter on Commanding the Battle is excellent. Storr advocates lean command staff’s and dispersed decision making. “We should employ the best brains in small groups, rather than try to assemble a collective brain.” He points out that “when staff numbers are reduced, the effectiveness of HQ improves.” “Reducing staff numbers would increase speed with which they could get things done.” [Amazingly, Storr quotes a work from 1998 that reports a typical Western division commander has 600 people supporting!—and that number has, I’m sure increased in 10 years.] He concludes this excellent chapter making a distinction between technology and the human factor: “…the future is not digital: it’s human. What is needed is things that bind talents together as a team, not more bandwidth…given time, resources, open minds and not much money we could revolutionize land tactical command. The key problems are human, cultural and institutional.” 

Storr asserts that successful modern commanders are most likely intuitive thinkers and possess the ability to learn from experience. He suggests further the “tendency to learn is more critical. It implies a tendency to reflect on experience and to learn from it, to maximize the benefit of the experience.” This tendency is key to the development of “skills”. He encourages a “permissive man-management regime that allows those who can learn rapidly from their experience to do so.” At the opposite end, Storr makes clear the unsuitability of many leaders who use bullying tactics and fear to motivate. 

Storr concludes by observing that “institutional conservatism” inhibits armed forces from improving significantly during times of peace; that “the current size and shape of Western armies reflect issues that are not primarily related to warfighting effectiveness.” He insists that doctrine should be explicit, relevant,(descriptive and where appropriate, prescriptive), coherent, and practical. The short tours common in western armies harm team integrity—which is “huge”. Innovation is vital, and in many cases military members aren’t with a unit long enough to have the experience necessary to truly innovate. Storr advocates “experience is the best way to achieve practical coordination and overcome the fog of war, as long as the experience gained is positive.” He discourages the common use of lieutenant-colonels in jobs where a captain or major could function/thrive/learn; as these junior officers will have less experience when they are promoted and will have probably developed the habit of “referring decisions upwards, and hence develop little initiative.” 

According the Storr, the “human” aspect of war should take prevalence over technology. He acknowledges the utility of technology, but asks the reader to “…pause and look for a moment at the Vietnam War, which suggests that superior technology is not always the deciding factor.” [9-11 is illustrative of this point on the “terror” side; determination and box cutters wreaked havoc.] 

My review does not do justice to the wealth of information, insight, and counsel in Storr’s book and I quote him frequently because his style is better than a summary. This book was aimed at a narrow audience, hence the high price. When I began, I was concerned about Storr’ opinions concerning John Boyd’s OODA loop; but in late 2009 I rejected Boyd’s deterministic underpinnings of OODA—Storr’s pragmatic and partial empiricism makes more sense. OODA remains, in my humble opinion, a valuable and versatile methodology in both the military/law enforcement and business arenas. 

This book is highly recommended; particularly for junior officers and NCO’s—the price is high, but what you will gain will be worth the cost.

UPDATE 11.17.2011: Jim Storr contacted me and confirmed the issue of a paperback for about $40.

[ by Charles Cameron – Occupy movement, banks and rumors of banks, date setting, apocalyptic, and just a hint of Y2K ]

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I’ve said it before, I think: we’re witnessing Y2K: the Expectation in slo-mo.

1.

Now it’s time for banks and rumors of banks to run up the flagpole once again.  As I say in the title of this post, there’s a certain percentage of human brains that simply can’t take the heat, and should stay out of the kitchen. Perhaps I’m being generous in my estimate of the percentage…

So here are three dates to mark on your calendar: October 15th, which is tomorrow at the time of writing, October 21st, coming up shortly, and October 31st, if we live to see the day…

Let’s take them in reverse order:

The October 31st option lacks intelligence, in my not always humble opinion, for two reasons: first, because it’s all a bit like yelling fire in a cinema for the deaf when you don’t know sign language — almost no-one will pay enough attention to take the action you’re recommending — and second, because even if you want to see a significant change away from the ways in which money can buy influence at the moment, the idea of crashing the banks as a means to that end will only turn people away from the larger movement into which you’ve somehow inserted yourself.

Informing politicians that the more “bought and paid for” money they get, the fewer voters will vote for them is one thing. Creating a sustainable parallel system that could mitigate crises, ensuring local food distribution in the event of a disruption of the trucking industry for instance, is another, in much the same spirit.  But crashing the world economic system isn’t even a thing — it’s demented.

So October 31st is a non-starter: pop, fizzle and #FAIL.

Which is lucky, because according to Harold Camping, whose one hundred million dollar campaign to alert us all that the world would end earlier this year didn’t manage to buy God’s decision-making process, there won’t be anyone, anywhere, after October 21st — let alone any banks to withdraw funds from.

No doubt, like Camping’s previous predictions, this one too will fizzle and #FAIL

I wouldn’t care to guess what percentage of my 3% of human brains unable to take the heat will be following Camping at this point, or what percentage the bank crasher will claim, but there’s still room on my dance card for 2012, and this won’t be the last we hear of such ideas.

2.

Which leaves us with tomorrow, a day very much like yesterday… which it will soon turn into?

This one’s interesting because although it has a date certain — one, mark you, that conflicts with the October 31st idea — the event itself doesn’t appear to be scripted [see video].

So who knows?  The suspense is killing me — but it won’t be for long.

3.

Y2K had its fair share of apocalyptic expectations, threatened SCADA failures, worries about supply chains, bank runs and the like, and I’ve suggested [more than once] that we could really use a decent map of our critical dependencies — one that includes our human capacities for fear, fury, obstructionism, fatalism, indecision, generosity, competition and cooperation…

Time for an eTank — or an  iTank, or a G+Tank — eh?

Come now, let us reason together..

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, silos, Y2K, 9/11, rumors, wars, Boeing 747s, Diebold voting machines, vulnerabilities, dependencies ]

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The “bug” of Y2K never quite measured up to the 1919 influenza bug in terms of devastating effect — but as TPM Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

1.

My own personal preoccupations during the run-up to Y2K had to do with cults, militias and terrorists — any one of which might have tried for a spectacle.

As it turned out, though, Al Qaida’s plan to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was foiled when Albert Ressam was arrested attempting to enter the US from Canada — so that aspect of what might have happened during the roll-over was essentially postponed until September 11, 2001. And the leaders of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, acting on visionary instructions (allegedly) from the Virgin Mary, announced that the end of the world had been postponed from Dec 31 / Jan 1 till March 17 — at which point they burned 500 of their members to death in their locked church. So that apocalyptic possibility, too, was temporarily averted.

2.

Don Beck of the National Values Center / The Spiral Dynamics Group, commented to me at one point in the run-up:

Y2K is like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.

— and that quote from Beck, along with Barnett’s observation, pointed strongly to the fact that we don’t have anything remotely resembling a decent global map of interdependencies and vulnerabilities.

What we have instead is a PERT chart for this or that, Markov diagrams, social network maps, railroad maps and timetables… oodles and oodles of smaller pieces of the puzzle of past, present and future… each with its own symbol system and limited scope. Our mapping, in other words, is territorialized, siloed, and disconnected, while the world system which is integral to our being and survival is connected, indeed, seamlessly interwoven.

I’ve suggested before now that our mapping needs to pass across the Cartesian divide from the objective to the subjective, from materiel to morale, from the quantitative to the qualitative, and from rumors to wars. It also needs a uniform language or translation service, so that Jay Forrester system dynamic models can “talk” with PERT and Markov and the rest, Bucky Fuller‘s World Game included.

I suppose some of all this is ongoing, somewhere behind impenetrable curtains, but I wonder how much.

3.

In the meantime, and working from open source materials, the only kind to which I have access – here are two data points we might have noted a litle earlier, if we had decent interdependency and vulnerability mapping:

Fear-mongering — or significant alerts?  I’m not tech savvy enough to know.

4.

Tom Barnett’s point about “the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age” still stands.

Y2K was what first alerted me to the significance of SCADAs.

Something very like what Y2K might have been seems to be unfolding — but slowly, slowly.

Are we thinking yet?

That are complementary:

Fabius Maximus –Our fears are unwarranted. America is in fact well-governed.

….America is in better shape than Europe and Japan.  We have good demographics, sound fundamentals, relatively easily solved problems, and no powerful enemies.  Why the constant sense of crisis?  QE2, hyperinflation, climate armageddon, Obama the socialist, AIDS, alar on apples, jihadists, debt, swine flu – a constant drumroll of doom, explained by Peter Moore in “The Crisis Crisis” (Playboy, March 1987).   Answer:  elites govern a weak people by exploiting their fears.  For example, look at the “government is broke” panic.

• The Federal government’s net debt is only 2/3 of GDP, well below the 100% of GDP “red line” (that Italy reached many years ago).
• The short-term deficit is mostly the result of the recession.  The medium-term deficit results from the Bush tax cuts.
• Social security’s funding gap is small vs. GDP and easily fixed.
• The massive funding gap is mostly Medicare, easily fixed by adopting features from the mixed public-private systems in Europe.

Panic pushes Americans to allow cuts to popular social services plus increased and highly regressive taxes.  No matter who wins, after the 2012 election our representatives will implement the necessary policy changes:  raising taxes, cutting expenditures, rebuilding our infrastructure, and beginning the long process of reforming health care.  It will be another morning in America.  There is no crippling polarization, just distracting noise masking a consensus between both parties about the key points of economic and foreign policy.

We do not see this long-standing pattern (see the previous post for details) because our collective OODA loop is broken (see section 6 here).  That makes us easier to lead.  Relying on wealth-based elites to run the country has a cost.  They take a large share of the pie; we take a small slice….

Global Guerrillas –JOURNAL: Global Financial Cancer

….A couple of years ago, I wrote that the underlying structure of the global financial system was a “bow-tie.”  Here’s what I said (it’s worth going back and reading the entire article and this paper on bow-ties from John Doyle at Caltech):

If we look at this new global system from a distance, its architecture is something called a bow-tie. This is a universal control system architecture that underlies complex systems from the Internet to cell metabolism.

What is a Bow Tie?

The bow-tie is a very powerful approach to organizing a complex system (it’s a system design that is used by controls engineers.)  Visually, it starts with complex inputs (the left side of the bow-tie), boils them down into simple build blocks (the knot), which then allows the construction of complex outputs (the right side of the bow-tie….

….Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the earlier article, bow-ties are vulnerable to organisms that attach themselves to the knot at their center (like the way cancer uses the body’s metabolism system).  These organisms relentlessly use the bow-tie’s knot to for selfish ends (rapid growth).  The end result is typically death for the system.  My suggestion was that the instability we were seeing in the financial system was an indication that it had been co-opted by a malicious, self-serving organism.

Of course, at the time there wasn’t much data to support this systemic analysis.  That has been rectified with a new paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control by Vitali et. al. from ETH in Zurich.  This paper finds, through extensive network analysis, that a small group of tightly intertwined financial institutions control the bow of the global financial system.  It is in effect, the world’s first super-organism….

They are both right. Probably not perfectly, the American economy, even more the world’s, is too complex a subject, but right enough.

FM is right that the emerging class of people I have been calling “the Oligarchy” the past couple of years do not intend to deliberately implode the system that is working outrageously to their benefit. They are currently in the stage of trying to come up with an arsenal of tax-farming schemes that will pass political muster (i.e. – not provoke uncontrollable, “Arab Spring” street demonstrations or a successful populist electoral revolt  that would eject their sycophants from government en masse in a single election) and are quietly, methodically and strategically neutering the capacity of the populace to resist their rule over the long term. It is there that we see seemingly unrelated measures as the coordinated political attack on public education and university education, restrictions on the ability of citizens to get courts to review arbitrary actions of Federal agencies, imposition of laws to permit total surveillance of US citizens and acquisition of their personal information and so on.

The elite, who are not completely cohesive or formally organized, are supremely confident in their ability to manage the technocratic economy they are putting into place, or if bumps in the road appear, to squeeze sufficient new leverage from the populace through inflation, devaluation and other forms of expropriation. Unfortunately, I am not confident that these folks are nearly as competent as they imagine themselves to be. Nor am I sure that the global system that they have built, a high-performance, deeply complex, ultra-leveraged, financial sector dominant political economy isn’t as fragile and dangerously unstable as people like John Robb and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have maintained it is. The system might not just crash, it could crash to extreme depths with unprecedented speed with unforseen consequences (financial systems also ensure the reliable and continuous logistical flow of *food* and *power* to population centers).

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from ChicagoBoyz ]

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about William Carlos Williams and his observation in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower:

Our news media blare with (apocalyptic but not revelatory) trumpets…

while Hokusai, painting circa 1831, conveys the vulnerability of the (Japanese and human) situation with his image of boats in a storm.

*

Here’s Dr. Barnett, in my own transcript of his video this week:

The surprise factor here really shouldn’t exist in our minds. I mean the mega-disaster of a tsunami plus and earthquake plus a nuclear meltdown in Japan – well, those three are already highly linked. Japan highly depends on nuclear power, it’s one of the most seismically active island chains in the world, and tsunami is a Japanese word. So if you are going to put a forty year old very aging early technology nuclear power plant right on the coast in Japan, the only mega-disaster you’re going to get there is an earthquake-triggered, tsunami-delivered nuclear meltdown. So these are not surprising connections, we’re just bumping into the connectivity that’s natural and only becoming more expansive as globalization advances.

That’s exactly right – and Hokusai should have been an early warning.

The only thing missing from Barnett’s analysis, and present in Hokusai, is Mt. Fuji – or what TS Eliot (to circle back again to “verbal” poetry) would call “the still point of the turning world”.