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Sean finds Dr. Barnett briefing on youtube:

One of these days, I have to catch Tom doing his brief live. Perhaps there will be a “ Great Powers: 2009” tour hitting Chicago. 🙂

The Armed Forces Journal cover story features Colonel T.X. Hammes giving an an “outside the box” reading list to change traditional thinking in defense circles:

“Read different”

Although the wider academic and business communities are coming to grips with the fact that many of these advances are changing the way we understand the world, the defense industry does not seem to see this as an issue. We still tend to view the world as responding to linear approaches applied by bureaucratic entities.

Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, a number of books have provided thought-provoking new theories of how the world works. Unfortunately, these theories do not align with the planning processes we use in the defense industry. The first step in fixing our planning processes is to examine how science’s understanding of reality is changing.The authors of these works highlight aspects of how the world has changed. This forces us to change how we frame problems, how we organize to deal with them and even how to get the best out of our people. For instance, if one still saw the world as a hierarchy, then one looked for the “leadership” of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003. Yet if one saw the world as a network in which emergent intelligence is a key factor, then one quickly saw the networked insurgent entities as they evolved an emergent strategy in Iraq. Our ability to adjust to the rapidly changing future security environment will, to a large degree, depend on our ability to understand the world as it is rather than as we have been taught to understand it. Reading these 12 books should help.

Here is the list, and it is a good one. I’ve read several, have some of the other books in my “antilibrary” and a few are new to me. You can go to the article to get some commentary regarding each book by Dr. Hammes:

Chaos: Making a New Science 

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means 

Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design ( U.S. Army pamphlet)

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)

The Wisdom of Crowds

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Helix Books)

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

An excellent list but one to which I think we need to add a few more. While any comments are welcome, I suggest that readers also chime in and nominate a couple ( 1 or 2) worthy reads that fit the spirit of Col. Hammes’ intent. My nominations are  Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson.

UPDATE:

Great recs are already in the comment section! I will start putting them together as a linked set of ” Reader’s Reading List”. Note also Smitten Eagle has posted up.

Maj. Don Vandergirff has the extended remarks of Col. Bacevich before Congress.

Dr. Andrew Bacevich was also featured recently by Jeremy Young over at Progressive Historians

While I was away, the SWJ Blog ran a thoughtful essay by General  Huba Wass de Czege on the new military doctrine on irregular warfare. Not only is he good on the substance, Wass de Czege demonstrates how one needs to begin with clear thinking when attempting to formulate and apply usefuyl concepts:

A Reflection on the Illogic of New Military Concepts

What is it about the US Military that tends to produce sound, pragmatic, and common sense ideas about the concrete present, and tends toward illogic, faddish paradigms and hyperbole when dealing with the abstract future? Joint Operating Concepts for dealing with post cold war security problems have proven difficult to “get right.” This is because they begin from the wrong logical starting point and thus define the problem incorrectly. It is also because of inattention to historical fact, definitional subtlety and the theoretical logic within which military forces must operate. This inattention overlooks key logical inconsistencies in such documents crafted more to “sell” to constituencies within the Washington “Beltway” the capabilities and programs championed by one military interest group or another rather than to inform current decisions in the field.

….”Beltway” constituencies have been educated to think according to the attractive new paradigms military professionals have used to buttress their budget arguments.

Read the rest here.

Much thanks to Eddie Beaver and Lexington Green who separately but nearly simultaneously sent me links this morning to a very fine e-zine, Democracy Journal.org. What caught their eye were the following articles by some familiar names:

“Pentagon 2.0” by Colonel T.X. Hammes

The author of the critically acclaimed The Sling and the Stone reviews the latest book by another premier military theorist, John Arquilla’s Worst Enemy and finds it wanting.

“Return of the Jihadi” by Andrew Exum a.k.a. “Abu Muqawama”

Exum methodically analyzes the implications of “when Omar comes marching home” and offers sensible solutions I would describe as “Interagency COIN Jointness”.

Parenthetical aside: One side effect of the GWOT/Iraq War/Afghanistan, I think we shall see in the coming decade, is to have created a generation of future policy makers and statesmen like we have not seen since WWII.