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The Insurgent Archipelago by John Mackinlay

At the strong recommendation of Colonel Gian Gentile, I ordered The Insurgent Archipelago: From Mao to Bin Laden by Dr. John Mackinlay of King’s College, London and a hardcover copy just arrived this afternoon. Judging from the table of contents and the sources in Mackinlay’s endnotes, The Insurgent Archipelago will present a tightly written argument on the nature of COIN. For a well regarded  and informative review, see David Betz of Kings of War blog, brief excerpt below:

Review: The Insurgent Archipelago

….The book is sweeping, as the subtitle ‘From Mao to Bin Laden’ suggests; yet it is also admirably succinct at 292 pages including notes and index.[2] In design it is exceedingly clear, consisting of three parts-‘Maoism’, ‘Post-Maoism’, and ‘Responding to Post-Maoism’, which reflect the basic components of his argument. Insurgency’s classical form is the brainchild of the carnivorously ambitious strategic and political genius Mao Zedong who gave meaning to the now familiar bumper sticker that insurgency is ’80 per cent political and 20 per cent military’. Mao’s innovation was to figure out what to fill that 80 per cent with: industrial scale political subversion by which he was able to harness the latent power of an aggrieved population to the wagon of political change, to whit the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War which ended with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949

….The problem is that what we now face in the form of ‘global insurgency’ is not Maoism but Post-Maoism-a form of insurgency which differs significantly from that which preceded it.[6] We have, in essence, been searching for the right tool to defeat today’s most virulent insurgency in the wrong conceptual tool box. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable truth to be laid out in this book; another worrying one is that the security interests of Western Europe differ markedly from those of the United States-because the threat in the former emerges from their own undigested Muslim minorities which are alienated further by their involvement in expeditionary campaigns which, arguably at least, serve the needs of the latter well enough

Oddly, this will be the second book by a former British Gurkha officer that I’ve read in the last six months; the first being The Call of Nepal: My Life In the Himalayan Homeland of Britain’s Gurkha Soldiers by Colonel J.P. Cross, which I played a minor role in getting reissued here by Nimble Books, along with Lexington Green. After just thumbing through a few pages, Dr. Mackinlay already strikes me as a far less mystically inclined military author than does the esteemed but eccentric Colonel Cross.

I am way behind in my book reviews. Fortunately, Charles Cameron is stepping up with a new series of posts this week, which will give me some time to write reviews at least for Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld and Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel and then read Mackinlay. Ah, this designated guest blogger business is proving to be most convenient! 🙂

AFJ has an intellectually provocative set of articles up. Bravo to the editors!:

Frank G. Hoffman – EXPEDITIONARY ETHOS

The geo-strategist Halford McKinder once divided major states between Land and Sea Wolves. States that have an expeditionary capability are not limited to either/or status. They crossbreed their wolf packs to swim if needed and conduct operations ashore far from home when called upon. This expeditionary capability allows a state to apply strategic leverage across the physical domains. Most critically, expeditionary capabilities allow powers to deal with or minimize geographical and environmental constraints. Expeditionary forces allow maritime powers the opportunity to exploit their mastery of the seas to their advantage. Equally important, expeditionary forces can help offset the disadvantages of a purely maritime-based approach and provide even Continental Elephants the ability to project power when their interests are served by that capability 

….Combinations. The neat distinctions or intellectual bins we make between conventional and irregular warfare are useful, but only to a degree. The future portends potentially aggravating circumstances that will make the neat distinction between state and nonstate moot, and the delineation between conventional and irregular adversaries irrelevant. Thanks in part to globalization and the rapid transmission of ideas and technology, there is a recognizable fusion or blurring of regular and irregular modes of combat, into what might be called “combinational” or hybrid warfare.

Hybrid threats incorporate combinations of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder. These multimodal operations display a novel degree of operational and tactical fusion in time and space. They may confound purely conventional approaches and kinetic solutions, and may also foil today’s emphasis on population-centric counterinsurgency strategies.

This article will probably aggravate the Big Army Clausewitzians. Not because Hoffman does not take their concerns seriously, he does and sides with Colin Gray over the more utopian predictions of the end of interstate warfare, but because Hoffman regards their concerns as only one significant nodal point on a wide spectrum of national security threats.

Ionut C. Popescu – THE LAST QDR? WHAT THE PENTAGON SHOULD LEARN FROM CORPORATIONS ABOUT STRATEGIC PLANNING 

….Unfortunately, even though the U.S. military improved its ability to develop emergent strategies in recent years, particularly when it comes to dealing with tactical and operational challenges, the Pentagon’s formal strategic planning process remains grounded in the outdated premises of the rational design model. Despite its repeated manifest failures in achieving the integration of strategy, programs and budgets, the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS), a holdover of the McNamara era, continues to represent the management approach used to build up defense budgets. Similarly, the QDR exercises, another attempt to “make strategy” through a top-down rational design model, have been so overtaken by the bureaucratic rivalries among the military services that they served little strategic purpose once they were finalized. Despite the frustration with this traditional form of planning, both among civilian and military participants, the Defense Department at an institutional level has not yet found a way to adapt its strategic planning mechanisms to meet the demands of today’s rapidly changing external environment.

….This focus on “competitive strategy” has been advocated in the debates on U.S. defense strategy by Andrew Marshall, Barry Watts and Andrew Krepinevich, among others, who have urged the U.S. military to focus on creating and exploiting asymmetrical advantages as the key to successful strategy-making. While these authors’ have been remarkable in their attempt to shift the focus away from the 1950s and 1960s traditional model of planning, recent developments in the business literature in the past decade have now moved away from this emphasis on competitive advantage (prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s) to an emphasis on strategic innovation and planned emergence.

The “learning model” of emergent strategy formation is based on Mintzberg’s premise that the “complex and unpredictable nature of the organization’s environment, often coupled with the diffusion of knowledge bases necessary for strategy, precludes deliberate control; strategy making must above all take the form of a process of learning over time, in which, at the limit, formulation and implementation become indistinguishable.”

Sharp work by newcomer Popescu. Most discussions of strategy are left disconnected from the cloying morass of Pentagon internal bureaucratic process, which ultimately needs to be addessed is performance and operational capabilities are to improve. Popescu excavates the intellectual origins and limitations of current planning models that hail from the salad days of IBM’s man in a gray flannel suit.

Joseph J. Collins – Essay: Afghan reconciliation

….Negotiators will have to deal with a number of complicating factors. For one, the Taliban has many factions. In the South, we have the original Taliban, but in the East and the Northeast, the fighters come from the Haqqani network and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s faction of Hezbi Islami, which has been at war since 1978. Complicating the issue, there are now multiple Pakistani Taliban factions, some of which operate in both countries. When we talk to the Taliban, we will have to deal with its many parts. The divisions provide us opportunities for divide-and-conquer tactics, but it also means that some factions may reconcile while others continue to fight

….Third, the Taliban regime also conducted numerous crimes against humanity for which there has never been an accounting. In addition to the extreme repression of the entire Afghan citizenry – no kites, no music, no female education, bizarre human rights practices, executions at soccer matches etc. – thousands of Afghans, especially non-Pashtuns, were killed by the Taliban. Compounding that problem, the contemporary Taliban usually try to win hearts and minds through terror tactics and repression. Even today, when they are trying to attract more followers with propaganda and Sharia-based dispute resolution, the Taliban’s approval ratings in most polls does not reach 20 percent. The Taliban rule of about five years was also a practical disaster for Afghanistan. Along with their bloody record as insurgents, the Taliban’s leaders no doubt remember that five years into their “rule,” only three countries had recognized them.

…. Political reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Taliban (or any of their factions) should require a number of key conditions. First, the Taliban must verifiably lay down their arms. They must accept the Afghan Constitution and agree to operate within it. War criminals and close associates of al-Qaida will be ineligible for reintegration. The Taliban must also forsake the criminal enterprises that have become their lifeline and agree to become a legitimate political party inside Afghanistan. There can be no offers of territorial power sharing or extra constitutional arrangements, but later, Taliban cabinet officers and appointed provincial or district governors should not be ruled out. Taliban fighters could clearly be integrated into the ethnically integrated Afghan security forces after retraining and indoctrination. Taliban farmers can be given stipends or even land as an incentive.

Col. Collins is offering a strong dose of realism regarding talks with the Taliban(s) and possible outcomes. In my view, negotiations might be better regarded as “peeling an onion” than an all-or-nothing deal.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

High Conceptual Thinkers

by Charles Cameron

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Eric Drexler’s advice on this topic, but unless Zen mentioned it previously, or perhaps John Robb, I don’t know where I’d have seen it before. This is the part that gets to me:

Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.

Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.

Each time I see that, I have to laugh. Here’s the same tale, told from the arts and humanities side of the house…

*

When I was a lad, they sent me to Wellington College, the private boarding school that prepares officers’ sons for admission to Sandhurst, and the life of a British army officer. I was not that way inclined, to be honest, and soon found myself a nice corner of the library with a comfortable chair, which I made my own.

I scanned the books in that area more closely than most, and one set of books caught my eye. It was the set of six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks.

Eranos was a yearly gathering in Switzerland, at which CG Jung more or less presided, and at which his scholar friends read learned papers to each other at the highest levels of their own expertise.

These books night as well have been in Ge’ez, as far as I was concerned. They talked about things like “Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairy Tales” (which is actually about gods in wild animal form, Ganesh with his elephant’s head for example), “Aeschylus: The Eumenides” about the Greek tragedy of that name, “The Spirit of Science” (that would be Erwin Schodinger speaking, which will give you an idea of the caliber of invitees) — and those are just picked from the first of the six volumes.

And how these folks went at their discussions! If a nice quote from Horace was in order, Latin’s the language. French, yes, German too, for Kant or Nietzsche. That’s okay. But Coptic? Egyptian hieroglyphs? Diagrams culled from Kabbalistic treatises about how there’s a waterfall of grace that falls constantly from G*d through ten distinct steps to the creation we inhabit, and how to climb carefully back up before the Throne?

Scattered through the six volumes were Jung, Schrodinger, Rahner, Kerenyi, Zimmer, Puesch, Quispel (between them, these two covered the waterfront on Gnostic studies), Massignon, Corbin (ditto for Islam and its mystics and martyrs), Neumann, Eliade, Tillich, Suzuki (he brought Zen to the west), Danielou, Zimmer, van der Leeuv, Wilhelm (he brought the west the I Ching), LL Whyte… I don’t believe Wolfgang Pauli ever   attended, but 400 of his dreams were discussed there under cover of anonymity by CG Jung.

I had not the least idea what these folks were on about, maybe a third of the nouns and verbs were nouns and verbs I’d never met before, and maybe a sixth of those weren’t even in my trusty Concise Oxford Dictionary: this was true scholarship, and I was aware I was in paradise.

I left that school, thankfully, and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where I studied Theology, and learned early on that my interest was not in studying that “particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it” — I scraped by Oxford’s intense finals with what was called a “gentleman’s Third” — and I have spent the rest of my life searching out scholarship and experiences having to do with inspiration, intuition and imagination.

I’ve found myself trotting around the globe, studying now Zen then Hinduism then Lakota shamanism, at last returning to the European west via Jung and Hermann Hesse, singing Gregorian Chant under the baton of the choir master at Solesmes, meditating, sweating my buckskin out (as they say) in “stone people’s lodges”, teaching creativity in the Los Angeles atelier of a master artist, Jan Valentin Saether — and somewhere around the age of forty, I discovered the six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks again in a second hand bookstore, and once more read them.

This time, I found they were heady but somewhat comprehensible reading, covering the entire extent of the studies to which my fascinations had led me in the intervening years — Alchemy, the Gnostics, Sufism, Zen, the Mystery cults, poetics, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, depth psychology, symbolism, the philosophy of science.

And that roll call of contributors was the roll call of half the modern masters in each of those fields.

I have the hope that I shall live to be seventy five, and read those papers as though a peer of those who assembled by the lake there in Eranos at Jung’s invitation: that those miraculous inkings of paper will at last make almost perfect sense to me, and that maybe, perhaps, it might be, may it be so — insh’allah and the creek don’t rise — I might even be able to write the odd footnote updating a passage here or there with my own insights.

Science and Nature didn’t get a look in. For me, it was Eranos all the way.

And one more story, unrelated to Eranos, but still describing my time at Wellington:

I seem to be one of those High Conceptual sorts the Eide’s are talking about — eccentric, to be sure — and I vaguely recall being hauled into the Headmaster’s office at Wellington and being accused of plagiarism, because I had written a fifteen page paper on the Contortionists of Saint Medard, the Jansenists, and Pascal. Here we go again — prior to that, I had submittedeach week three page essays on assigned topics such as “The football game” or “What I did on vacation” — but this week my English master was sick, and had   phoned in to say we could write about whatever we wanted. I’d taken him at his word, and spread my wings — and lucky for me, I could point out that the College library didn’t have enough material on the subject of the Jansenists for me to have plausibly plagiarized my essay.

Why were the strange people of Saint Medard so interesting to this young lad? Because they contorted and tortured their bodies like yogis, in what was (as far as I could tell) the first experiential attempt within Christendom to prove the hypothesis of the triumph of mind over body.

*

Now that’s all a bit selfish and introspective by way of background. But it lets you know the kinship I feel for Drexler’s crafty strategy, and likewise for the Eide’s notion of (I hesitate to write the words) “High Conceptual Thinkers”.

I want to make two points about HCTs here.

The first is to suggest that what Zen calls seeing meta-patterns is pretty much analogical / metaphorical thinking (ie lateral vs linear): the poet’s spécialité de la maison.

The second is that there exists a great project — great as in the Olympics, great as in the search for the Grand Unified Theory in physics, great as in the Italian Renaissance — for the assembly of all human cultural and scientific knowledge in a single architecture, in the form of the conceptual Glass Bead Game of Hermann Hesse.

Lewis Lapham,  in a Harper’s editorial back in 1997 said he expected the editors at Wired would soon discover Hesse’s book, and that Microsoft would want to name software in its honor.

It hasn’t happened yet. I hope it does. And that’s another story, for another day.

The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, has long been one of my favorite blogs, probably the top non-.mil related, SME blog among my regular reads. Here’s an example of why:

Gifted Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

 High Conceptual Thinkers are often…- Omnivorous Learners: The world may be their oyster. Because of their quest for the “interesting”, they may love the Internet, read entire encyclopedias, or incessantly question adults about the real world, and so learn a little bit about everything. They may not hit ceiling scores on the conceptual knowledge IQ subtests because their omnivorous approach to figuring out the world around them.- New is the Thing: HCTs prefer novelty (this is how they develop new conceptual categories) and are tickled by unconventional viewpoints or discoveries. – Big Picture, Not Little Details: HCTs don’t always transition well to the “precision years” of late elementary, middle school, or beyond.

– Boredom is Death: Although using the ‘b’ word is notoriously a “no-no” word when talking to teachers, these kids rebel against what they see as boredom. Boredom may really seem like death to young HCTs. If young HCTs seem “driven by a motor”, it’s intellectual restlessness and it can be a blessing as well as a burden.

Not surprisingly, these kids often find classroom learning unsatisfying. After all, much of early education is focused on mastering basic skills or established facts, this is not what these kids are about. They’d rather be finding new worlds to conquer.

Although these kids are challenging to teach and parent, they are also a delight, and Dan Pink and others have suggested that the Conceptual Age is upon us and this pattern of thinking should be what we should be encouraging.

“High conceptual thinkers” – those with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, who see meta-level patterns and excel at constructing paradigms, extrapolation, synthesis and consilience are probably not a large percentage of the population and, most likely, they include eccentrics and cranks as well as highly accomplished individuals like E.O. Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Freeman Dyson, Nikola Tesla, Richard Feynman and probably figures like Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Winston Churchill, Robert Hooke, Da Vinci and numerous others.

There seems to be some congruency between HCTs and the category of people known as polymaths, which raises the question of whether HCT are born or can be encouraged to develop such a cognitive profile from education and life experience. The Eides offered a list of techniques for teaching children recognized as HCTs, but to my mind, these would also benefit a fairly broad section of students:

Teaching Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

– Sky’s the Limit: If an idea or a lesson would be interesting to a wonky tech-y post-college 20-something, then it’s fine for the HCT. If a story or thing could be written about in Wired, Fast Company, or Mental Floss, then you’re probably on the right track. Sky should be the limit. Even some generally excellent gifted programs we’ve seen may grossly underestimate an HCT’s ability to think about advanced concepts. Also because HCTs develop their ideas through pattern recognition, they may want to see many examples and permutations, and complex presentations in order to help organize their ideas into simpler concepts.

– Play with Ideas: Conceptual thinkers like and need to play with ideas. Play expands ideas, creating a new opening for associations. Play means not micromanaging learning experiences – allowing some dabbling, and taking away some of the “high stakes every time” routine (e.g. not everything should be graded).

– Argue with Ideas We think many educational curricula wait way to long before they allow young HCTs to consider different viewpoints, learn how to frame arguments or actually debate, but this is often what HCTs love. If they don’t get it at school, make sure they get it home…maybe at the dinner table? Half of the 400 eminent men and women profiled in the Goertzels’ Cradles of Eminence came from “opinionated” families: “It is these homes that produce most of the scientists, humanitarians, and reformers.”

Compare these recommendations with the advice offered by nanotechnologist Dr. Eric Drexler of Metamodern:

Studying to learn about everything

To intellectually ambitious students I recommend investing a lot of time in a mode of study that may feel wrong. An implicit lesson of classroom education is that successful study leads to good test scores, but this pattern of study is radically different. It cultivates understanding of a kind that won’t help pass tests – the classroom kind, that is.

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

Intellectual curiosity would seem to be the axis that would make these approaches work effectively, and possibly, that’s what these techniques stimulate.
 

Jamais Cascio explains the cognitive benefits of good futurist methodology:

Foresight exercises that result in a single future story are rarely as useful as they appear, because we can’t predict the future. The goal of futures thinking isn’t to make predictions; the goal is to look for surprising implications. By crafting multiple futures (each focused on your core dilemma), you can look at your issues from differing perspectives, and try to dig out what happens when critical drivers collide in various ways.

Whatever you come up with, you’ll be wrong. The future that does eventually emerge will almost certainly not look like the scenarios you construct. However, it’s possible to be wrong in useful ways–good scenarios will trigger minor epiphanies (what more traditional consultants usually call “aha!” moments), giving you clues about what to keep an eye out for that you otherwise would have missed.

Yes. I would add that such thought experiments also help to improve pattern recognition in analyzing reality. From teasing out logically sound, if fictional, consequences, we become more discerning about recognizing causation and potential second and third order effects of events or policy choices.

Useful.