zenpundit.com

This article at SWJ blog has stirred a lively debate in the comments section with some very able practitioner-scholars weighing in.

….Sun Tzu?s ancient military philosophy of indirectness and gradualism runs counter-culture with much of mainstream western military strategy. Western reliance on superior technology and firepower shaped American counterinsurgency doctrine to be largely lethal in nature and enemy focused. Clausewitz instructed generations of military officers that the destruction of the enemy?s army is the primary goal in all combat1; therefore, all political-military conflict results in offensive action where attrition of the enemy force becomes a universal requirement. Clausewitzian war theory „worked? in both world wars in that the Allies did accomplish their desired goals; however critics such as Israeli strategist Shimon Naveh raise valid questions on whether Clausewitz?s fixation on offensive action and attrition warfare helped or hindered the Allied causes2. Despite Clausewitzian strategy?s seemingly illogical structure, application of his theories in the major 20th century conflicts created an enduring military school of war strategy with „On War? taking a sacred position.

In fairness to Clausewitz, this is over the top.

The US military could use more Sun Tzu; it is far more Clausewitzian in the perspective of the officer corps than it is “Sun Tzuite”, but the armed services are not the Children of Clausewitz. Not even the US Army. We’d probably be better off if the American military was more thoroughly one or the other in terms of strategic culture than the industrial age, bureaucratic, ad hoc, legacy thinking non-strategic hodgepode that currently prevails.

I do not expect that to change. American military organizational culture is driven more by appropriations than by ideas.

Some Related Links:

Sonishi.com Interview with Martin van Creveld on Sun Tzu

Sonishi.com Interview with Chet Richards on Sun Tzu and Boyd

Christopher Bassford on Sun Tzu, Jomini and Clausewitz

Colin Gray on Clausewitz and the Modern Strategic World

The Clausewitz Roundtable

Strategy of the Headless Chicken

A great article in World Politics Review by Josh Kerbel, a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Intelligence Community ( Hat tip to Col. David Maxwell)

For the Intelligence Community, Creativity is the New Secret

It’s no secret that the increasing complexity of the international system — and in particular, its growing interconnectedness, integration, and interdependence — is eroding the fundamental business models of an ever-growing range of industries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the information industries, such as journalism, broadcasting, publishing, music and film, among others. More than a few entities have been swept to the brink of, or in some cases over, the precipice of irrelevance. And every information industry, it seems, is in some peril.

The U.S. intelligence community’s traditional model is similarly threatened by these transformations, but like so many other besieged industries, the IC is hesitant to deviate from it. In general terms, the IC’s model is a secret “collection-centric” one that:

– prizes classified data, with classification often directly correlated to value and significance;
– is driven by data availability, while analytical requirements remain secondary;
– is context-minimal, with analysis staying close to the collected data and in narrow account “lanes”;
– is current-oriented, since there are no collectable facts about the future;
– is warning-focused, emphasizing alarm-ringing;
– is product-centered, measuring success relative to the “finished intelligence” product provided to policymakers, rather than its utility or service.

This model ends up being highly “reductionist,” since secret collection leads to classification, compartmentalization and, inevitably, reduced distribution. Such a system, in which everything is constantly subdivided, was designed for the “complicated” — but not really “complex” — strategic environment of the Cold War. In that more linear environment, it was possible to know exactly where to look — namely, the USSR; access was severely restricted, making secret collection vital; the context of hostile intent and opposing alliances was well-understood; and the benefits of being forewarned, especially of imminent military action, was paramount.

Today’s complex strategic environment is vastly different. Now, there is no single focal point, as a threat or opportunity can emerge from almost anywhere; access is largely unrestricted, since the world is wide-open and information-rich; and context is much more ambiguous, because intent and relationships are fluid. In this more dynamic, non-linear strategic environment, reductionist approaches are, by themselves, a veritable recipe for systemic (i.e., strategic) surprise.

In practical terms, this means that it is no longer sufficient to just reactively collect data on how certain parts of the international system are acting in order to extrapolate discrete predictions. Rather, it’s crucial that such reductionist approaches be complemented by more “synthetic” approaches that proactively think about how the various parts of the larger system could interact, and consider how the synthesized range of possible threats and opportunities might be respectively averted or fostered. In other words, it is no longer enough to just monitor already identified issues. It is also necessary to envision potentially emergent ones. In short, it is time for the IC to use its imagination.

Read the rest here.

Comments, in no particular order of importance:
 
First, the underlying root problem is “political”. The IC is “collection-centric” primarily because the key “customers” for IC products have an implicit expectation of good intel as a higher level analytical journalism, just salted with some real-time “secrets” outside normal public purview. And some of them – George Schultz when he was SECSTATE is an example – want to be their own analyst, and are quick to complain about speculative,”edgy” analysis that clashes with their preconceptions. So IC senior managers are inclined to give the customer what they demand – current information which has a short shelf-life in terms of value. Educate the intel-consumer class of what the IC might be able to do given different tasks and they might start asking that new tasks be done.
 
Secondly, if the IC employed more programs that involved an investment in long-term “clandestinity” – it would both collect information of strategic, long-term value and offer the US opportunities to shape the responses of others through established networks of agents of influence. This is where imagination, speculation and synthesis would have greater play because of the need to create and seize opportunities rather than placing a premium on mitigating risk and avoiding failure.
 
The problem with analytical-reductionist culture in hierarchical institutions ( anywhere, not just the IC) runs deeper than a top-down, enforced, groupthink. Perceptive members of the org, even when compelled to parrot the party line “officially”, will often mock it privately and exchange more authentic critiques informally. The real problem is the extent to which this risk-averse, paralyzing, culture is psychologically  internalized by individual analysts to the point of creating lacunae. As individuals rise in the org they carry their lacunae with them and begin actively imparting them authoritatively upon their subordinates.
 
Ideally, a quality liberal education would be imparting a reflexive skepticism, a tolerance for uncertainty and a greater meta-cognitive self-awareness that would check the excessive certainty generated by an excessive reliance on the methodology of analytical-reductionism. Unfortunately, the emphasis upon academic specialization has been pushed down so hard in undergraduate and even high quality secondary public school education ( AP courses are the worst offenders) that generating good, insightful, questions is a cognitive skill that has been abandoned in favor of deriving “right answers” using “approved methods”.
 
Scenario-building is an  effective tool for breaking  analytical-reductionist  frameworks and freeing up our ability to synthesize and construct solutions. However, to be useful, scenarios require at least an internal logic or realism even if they represent improbable “blue sky” or “black swan” outcomes and they require more cognitively diverse inputs ( from “outsiders”, “amateurs” and “heretics”) to challenge what data the received culture considers significant.

Time to juxtapose.

Dr. John Nagl at Democracy Journal – Intellectual Firepower New threats require new think tanks

….He proposes, instead, creating a Federally Funded Research and Development Corporation, or FFRDC, dedicated to thinking about the Islamic terror threat in the same way that RAND thought about the Soviet nuclear threat. Stevenson suggests the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a model. It is undeniably a good and long-overdue idea, with likely payoffs hugely exceeding the few hundred million dollars such an organization would cost the taxpayer every year. But beyond the basics, Stevenson is working from the wrong mould. RAND was so influential not least because it was the brains behind an enormously large and powerful set of muscles called the Strategic Air Command, where peace was a profession and war just a hobby; DARPA provides thinking that feeds the mammoth U.S. defense industry. Stevenson’s proposed think tank would need similar need bone and muscle. But unlike the Strategic Air Command or the Department of Defense, the muscle we need today would motivate soft power, rather than hard steel.

It is not for me, a scribbler in a think tank, to denigrate the idea of creating another one. In fact, an underreported cause of the recent turnaround in Iraq has been General David Petraeus’ creation of his own brain trust consisting of many of the military’s brightest strategic thinkers on the challenges of insurgency [See Rachel Kleinfeld, “Petraeus the Progressive,” on page 107 of this issue]. If Petraeus could do so much on his own, just with thinkers he knew personally, imagine what the nation could do with a call to service by a president who valued thinking hard about problems?

I’m certainly in favor of a foreign policy DARPA – glad the wonks are catching up to my early, amateurish, efforts at blogging – and I also agree that a “new kind of think tank” is in order too. Hopefully these ideas that originated in the blogosphere will gain currency and become a reality before 2016  or 2020. 🙂

Rialtas.Net -Government 2.0 – Stigmergic Collaboration

I have just finished reading Mark Elliot’s PHD dissertation entitled “Stigmergic Collaboration- A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration” and I found it to be inspiring and profound.

This is one of the most scientific and rigorous examinations of mass collaboration and social networking technologies and their interactions that I have come across, and I highly recommend reading it. In fact reading this paper has reinforced my interest in 2.0 technologies and my view that they are just the beginning of a new mode of working and of communicating. In fact I am now totally fascinated by research in the area of stigmergy and emergence, thank you Mark.

One element covered by Elliot (and I hope he will correct me if I am misinterpreting him) is that the whole web 2.0 collaborative technology framework is an human emergent (stigmergic) structure, emerging spontaneously through the simple actions and interactions of many individuals self-organising and evolving more complex structures as the social and technological conditions necessary for these types of structure to emerge become more prevalent (just as termite mounds and ant hills arise out of the simple behaviour of individual insects). This is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the web and collaborative work (and of course collaborative art, and entertainment, and play…)

Dr. Mark Elliot’s blog is here, just FYI. Seems to be on hiatus.

Collaborative learning and organizational/collective learning are going to be the “next big thing” on the horizon, leaping off of the Web 2.0 tech community, epitomized by figures like Clay Shirky, Jason Calcanis, Scobleizer and Howard Rheingold ( who has a book on the works on this very subject or related to this subject). I’ve previously linked to “Minds on Fire” by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler; if you have not read it, you should. They are on target.

The obscure tie in here is that Dr. Nagl had  issued a strong, even passionate, call to rebuild the military as “learning organizations” at the the end of his excellent book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Becoming a “learning organization” (sometimes called a “Professional Learning Community” by educational wonks or a “Community of Practice” by techies and thought leader types) is dependent on organizational philosophy, not Web 2.0 technology but the tech is what gives social/collaborative/organizational learning the high octane of asynchronicity and the lowering of barriers to entry, distance and cost.

A wikinomic , “medici effect“world is coming.

ubiwar points to an excellent post at The Long Now summarizing a debate-discussion between historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz:

….Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz’s book on scenario planning, THE ART OF THE LONG VIEW, which he thought showed signs of “heuristic bias.” When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about “The Global Teenager,” which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz’s personal experience: “You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. “

Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that “great events should have great causes.” Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with “counter-factual history” helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to “think about what didn’t happen.” The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past.

In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.”

Historians and futurists use complementary methodologies that can enrich and inspire each other’s work.

Historians, accustomed to analytical searches for causation, are excellent at vetting the plausibility of imagineered, hypothetical scenarios and can inform through historical analogies. Futurists, in turn, are analytically attuned to alternatives and points of divergence and can help unearth what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “silent evidence” lurking in the often excessively linear and simplified causation explanations of historical narratives.

From John Robb at Global Guerillas:

The US national security budget is nearly $700 billion a year (much more if the total costs of Iraq/Afghanistan are thrown in), more than the rest of the world combined. Unfortunately, within that entire budget there isn’t a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism. Fatally, most of the big thinkers working on the future of warfare do their critical work in their spare time, usually while working other jobs to put food on the table for their families. In sum, this deficit in imagination will soon be the critical determinant on whether the national security bureaucracy remains relevant in a rapidly changing global security environment. That relevance is the key to its future.

From Fabius Maximus:

This has been criticised as dividing insurgencies into rigid categories – black and white, not accounting for the shades of grey found in all human experiences.  That is both true and a good thing.  All rules of thumb are arbitary, in some sense, but useful for practicioners who know their limitations.  Even the exceptions to this “rule” about insurgencies, and I believe they are quite few, tell us something new.  For example, the Malayan Emergency shows the importance of having a legitmate local government to do the heavy lifting (even though the COIN literature tend to follow the Brits’ view, considering it “their” win – not that of the locals).

The value of these kinds of insights was well expressed by a post Opposed Systems Design (4 March 2008):

A deeper understanding of these dynamics deserves an organized research program. The first concept – an artifically binary distinction between “foreign COIN” and “native COIN” – has served its purpose by highlighting the need for further work on the subject.

One reason for our difficulty grappling with 4GW is the lack of organized study.  We could learn much from a matrix of all insurgencies over along period (e.g., since 1900), described in a standardized fashion, analyzed for trends.  This has been done by several analysts on the equivalent of “scratch pads” (see IWCKI for details), but not with by a properly funded multi-disciplinary team (esp. to borrow or build computer models).

 We are spending trillions to fight a long war without marshalling or analysing the available data.  Hundreds of billions for the F-22, but only pennys for historical research.  It is a very expensive way to wage war.

When the Cold War was as young, the newest of America’s armed services, the Air Force, sought an intellectual edge over their venerable and tradtion-bound brothers and funded the ur-Think Tank, RAND Corporation. I say “funded” because the USAF brass, while they expected products that would justify a strategic raison d’etre for the Air Force to Congress, wisely allowed their creation autonomy and this in turn yielded intellectual freedom, exploration and creativity. The Air Force and the United States were richly rewarded by these egghead “wild men” who advanced nuclear warfighting and deterrence strategies, Game Theory analytics,  a renaissance in wargaming, Futurism and a multilpicity of other successes. Moreover, RAND itself became a model for a proliferation of other think tanks that created an intellectual zone for public intellectuals and scientists outside of the constraints of academia.

We need something like that today. A few years back, I called for a “DARPA for Foreign Policy” but the need is equally critical in considering the future of war and conflict as is taking a multidisciplinary, intersectional, insight-generating “Medici Effect” approach.

We can do better.

Wow-That-Was-Fast Department:

Wiggins extends the conversation on RAND’s origins as an inspiration for today.