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My esteemed colleague, Michael Tanji, goes knuckles over Think Tank 2.0.

Tanji has my 100 % endorsement.

The post title is tongue in cheek. Herman Kahn was anything but wrathful and came across in his day as a remarkably cheerful strategist of the apocalypse and deep futurist. Long time readers have noted my admiration for Kahn’s metacognitive strategies but for those unfamiliar with Herman Kahn, he was one of those polymathic, individuals of the WWII generation who, like Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, could jump into high level nuclear physics research without bothering to first acquire a PhD in the field (Feynman later received a doctorate, Dyson and Kahn never did). Kahn was noted for his forthright willingness to consider humanity’s long term prospects despite the worst calamities imaginable – unlike most optimists, he assumed the events most terrible could happen – but life nevertheless would go on. A position that caused many of his critics to go ape, including the editors of Scientific American.

I bring this up because his daughter, Deborah Kahn Cunningham, emailed to say that Kahn’s classic On Thermonuclear War  had been reissued by Transaction Publishing and there would soon be a new edition of On Escalation the latter of which will have a new foreword by the eminent nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling.

This could not come at a better time. The Obama administration is making grandiose gestures with America’s nuclear deterrent based less on a hardheaded and comprehensive strategic analysis than self-serving political showmanship, tailored to mollify a Left-wing base deeply resentful of the COIN strategy the administration is starting to take in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons affect the strategic calculus across the entire spectrum of potential decisions, they’re not just shiny, anachronistic, bargaining chips but the overwhelming reason that great power war came to an end in 1945. Period.

Human nature has not made much moral progress since the end of the Third Reich but its very worst instinct for total destruction has, so far, been held at bay by the certainty of self-destruction.

We need someone to remind us again of how to think about the unthinkable.

I recommend that you check out CounterStories, particularly readers interested in futurism, 5GW, IO and strategic thinking.

Edited by journalist, think tanker and long time blogfriend Paul Kretkowski, CounterStories develops scenarios for purposes of alternative analysis, counterintuitive thinking exercises, predictive futurism and good old fashioned fun. Scenarios are a very helpful complement to more quantitative futurist methodologies.

After his skilled moderation of The Clausewitz Roundtable, my friend Lexington Green has announced a new roundtable at Chicago Boyz for Fall of 2009 that will be dedicated to Xenophon’s  The Anabasis of Cyrus.

For those interested in participating in this roundtable, leave a note here in the comments for Lex or over at Chicago Boyz.

Dr. Chet Richards has a methodical review up at DNI on Antoine Bousquet’s new book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity:

The Scientific Way of Warfare

….Bousquet opens with and ultimately answers the question of “does network-centric warfare (NCW) work?” To reach his conclusion, he proposes four “regimes” in the application of science to modern warfare:

1. Mechanism, whose “key technology” was the clock, whose scientific framework was Newtonian, and whose military format was what we’d call first generation warfare — line, column, conformance, regularity
2. Thermodynamics, characterized by engines, whose framework included entropy, energy, and probability, and whose military paradigm was 2GW (Bousquet does not use the generations of war model)
3. Cybernetics — computers — whose scientific concepts included “negentropy,” negative feedback, homeostasis and whose military model would be modern 2GW, with heavy top-down, real time command and control
4. Chaoplexity, where networks reign, whose framework is built upon the new sciences of non-linearity, complexity, chaos, and self-organization, and where warfare is conducted by decentralized cells, teams, or swarms — what we would call both 3GW and 4GW (p. 30)

Subsequent chapters take the reader on a tour of these ideas in turn, exploring their evolution as scientific patterns and their influence on the warfare of their, and subsequent, eras. So the chapter on mechanistic warfare introduces Vauban, close-order drill, and culminates in Frederick the Great’s Clockwork Army. The next chapter, Thermodynamic Warfare, concludes with Clausewitz, which is a stretch, of course, since the great Prussian died in 1831, some 20 years before the first publications in that discipline. But with liberal interpretation of the massive text of On War, passages can be found that seem like precursors of the Second Law. Bousquet does point out that these interpretations were not made in Clausewitz’s day but were retrofitted by later analysts and generals, including as he also notes, John Boyd.

Read the rest here. Good stuff!