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Dr. Mark Drapeau and Dr. Linton Wells II in a National Defense University paper:

Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment (PDF)

….We have approached this research paper as an initial net assessment of how social software interacts with government and security in the broadest sense.1 The analysis looks at both sides of what once might have been called a “blue-red” balance to investigate how social software is being used (or could be used) by not only the United States and its allies, but also by adversaries and other counterparties. We have considered how incorporation of social software into U.S. Government (USG) missions is likely to be affected by different agencies, layers of bureaucracy within agencies, and various laws, policies, rules, and regulations. Finally, we take a preliminary look at questions like: How should the Department of Defense (DOD) use social software in all aspects of day-to-day operations? How will the evolution of using social software by nations and other entities within the global political, social, cultural, and ideological ecosystem influence the use of it by DOD? How might DOD be affected if it does not adopt social software into operations?

Saw this a day or two ago. Just finished reading the intro. Read the rest here.

Bill van Horn puts the COIN vs. Big Army debate into the larger context of the evolution of the U.S. Army since the Civil War, identifying structural changes that created a personnel system that emphasized individual military careers rather than long-term unit service:

The So-Called COIN Debate and Institutional Memory

…Small wars will not go away. They have always been a part of the international landscape, and show no signs of abating. While the Army should not abandon its conventional ability, it likewise cannot afford to shelve COIN/small wars/low intensity conflict again. As a succession of presidents have shown, overseas commitments will not decline just because the Army does not like them. In fact, they seem to become more common under idealistic administrations (Wilson, Clinton, G.W. Bush). Since the personnel system no longer allows the formation and retention of the Regular cadre that used to be the Army’s backbone for such operations, a conscious effort must be made on the part of the institution to preserve the hard-won lessons of our current small wars for future leaders and decision-makers.

….An Army that maintains and values its institutional COIN knowledge is well-placed to offer credible advice on the subject. War is war, but warfare has many shades, tones, and levels. Commanders who showed great battlefield ability and skill during the Civil War often foundered on the Frontier, and with disastrous results for the men under their command. Others performed with skill against one tribal group, only to fail when facing another. But those who built their reputations in the Civil War and then showed ability on the Frontier found themselves leading troops in the Philippines or providing advice to successive administrations prior to 1900. The Army cannot afford to lose that capability again.

Read the whole thing here:

John Robb is testified today before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capability on Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities. John put up a PDF of his testimony at Global Guerillas, here is a snippet but you should read John’s text in full:

MY TESTIMONY

….Against this dark picture, a combination of assault by a global economic system running amok and organic insurgency by superempowered small groups, there are few hard and fast recommendations I can provide. It’s complex. However, it is clear:

• We will need to become more efficient. Force structure will shrink. Most of the major weapons systems we currently maintain will become too expensive to maintain, particularly given their limited utility against the emerging threat. Current efforts from the F-22 and the Future Combat System appear to be particularly out of step with the evolving environment. Smaller and more efficient systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination systems built on open platforms (as in a Intranet) that alloworganic growth in complexity make much more sense.
• We should focus on the local. In almost all of these future conflicts, our ability to manage local conditions is paramount. Soldiers should be trained to operate in uncertain environments (the work of Don Vandergriff is important here) so they can deal with local chaos. Packages of technologies and methodologies should be developed to enable communities in distressed areas to become resilient – as in, they are able to produce the food, energy, defense, water, etc. they need to prosper without reference to a dysfunction regional or national situation. Finally, we need to get build systematic methods formanaging large numbers of militias that are nominally allied with us (like Anbar Awakening, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, etc.). Even a simple conversion of a commercial “customer relationship management” system would provide better institutional memory and oversight than we currently have.
• We need to get better at thinking about military theory. Military theory is rapidly evolving due to globalization. It’s amazing to me that the structures and organizations tasked with this role don’t provide this. We are likely in the same situation as we wereprior to WW2, where innovative thinking by JFC Fuller and Liddell Hart on armored warfare didn’t find a home in allied militaries, but was read feverishly by innovators in the German army like Guderian and Manstein. Unfortunately, in the current environment, most of the best thinking on military theory is now only tangentially associated with the DoD (worse, it’s done, as in my situation, on a part time basis).

A classy move on John’s part to take the time during his testimony highlight Don Vandergriff’s program of adaptive leadership ( another guy whom Congress should be hearing from)!

 Chairman Ike Skelton (D -Mo), judging by his impressive reading list in military affairs, is a Member of Congress who would seem to be keen to hear what John had to say. I’m very pleased to see Congress drawing upon the insights of strategic thinkers like John Robb and Tom Barnett, instead of the usual parade of niche specialists from the Beltway tanks.

Dr. Barnett made an important appearance today to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on the future of the U.S. Navy and the global strategic environment it faces:

Tom’s testimony today

I appear before the subcommittee today to provide my professional analysis of the current global security environment and future conflict trends, concentrating on how accurately–in my opinion–America’s naval services address both in their strategic vision and force-structure planning.  As has been the case throughout my two decades of working for, and with, the Department of Navy, current procurement plans portend a “train wreck” between desired fleet size and likely future budget levels dedicated to shipbuilding.  I am neither surprised nor dismayed by this current mismatch, for it reflects the inherent tension between the Department’s continuing desire to maintain some suitable portion of its legacy force and its more recent impulse toward adapting itself to the far more prosaic tasks of integrating globalization’s “frontier areas”–as I like to call them–as part of our nation’s decades-long effort to play bodyguard to the global economy’s advance, as well as defeat its enemies in the “long war against violent extremism” following 9/11.  Right now, this tension is mirrored throughout the Defense Department as a whole:  between what Secretary Gates has defined as the “next-war-itis” crowd (primarily Air Force and Navy) and those left with the ever-growing burdens of the long war–namely, the Army and Marines. 

….As someone who helped write the Department of Navy’s white paper, …From the Sea, in the early 1990s and has spent the last decade arguing that America’s grand strategy should center on fostering globalization’s advance, I greatly welcome the Department’s 2007 Maritime Strategic Concept that stated: 

United State seapower will be globally postured to secure our homeland and citizens from direct attack and to advance our interests around the world.  As our security and prosperity are inextricably linked with those of others, U.S. maritime forces will be deployed to protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance. 

Rather than merely focusing on whatever line-up of rogue powers constitutes today’s most pressing security threats, the Department’s strategic concept locates it operational center of gravity amidst the most pervasive and persistently revolutionary dynamics associated with globalization’s advance around the planet, for it is primarily in those frontier-like regions currently experiencing heightened levels of integration with the global economy (increasingly as the result of Asian economic activity, not Western) that we locate virtually all of the mass violence and instability in the system.   

Moreover, this strategic bias toward globalization’s Gap regions (e.g., a continuous posturing of “credible combat power” in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean) and SysAdmin-style operations there makes eminent sense in a time horizon likely to witness the disappearance of the three major-war scenarios that currently justify our nation’s continued funding of our Leviathan force–namely, China-Taiwan, Iran, and North Korea.  First, the Taiwan scenario increasingly bleeds plausibility as that island state seeks a peace treaty with the mainland and proceeds in its course of economic integration with China.  Second, as Iran moves ever closer to achieving an A-to-Z nuclear weapon capability, America finds itself effectively deterred from major war with that regime (even as Israel will likely make a show–largely futile–of delaying this achievement through conventional strikes sometime in the next 12 months).  Meanwhile, the six-party talks on North Korea have effectively demystified any potential great-power war scenarios stemming from that regime’s eventual collapse, as America now focuses largely on the question of “loose nukes” and China fears only that Pyongyang’s political demise might reflect badly on continued “communist” rule in Beijing–hardly the makings of World War III. 

Read the rest here.
 

Tom has probably made the heads of many senior admirals explode today. Though, it must be said, this is unlikely to be the first time that has happened and everything Dr. Barnett said this morning was perfectly consistent with what he’s been saying and writing for years, as he made clear in his statement. It’s more where he was saying it and to whom. Coming down so hard in Congressional testimony in favor of expanding the Navy’s capacity at littoral operations at the expense of capital ship building and submarines is waving a red flag at the “Big War” crowd while executing a taunting, end-zone dance.

Ok, I exaggerated that last part, but from the text, Tom gave a very strong signal to the Committee as to where the Navy should be headed in coming years.

UPDATE!!:

Evidently, Tom also caused the heads of committee members to explode as well. Galrahn was there at the hearing and had this anecdote:

My favorite moment was during Thomas Barnett’s opening statement, which I thought was really good. Dr. Barnett said something along the lines of “I want allies with million man armies and I want them to be ready to kill people,” which is strategically exactly right.

Well, what the audio and video won’t show is the reaction by Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D), who looked to me like she was about to either feint or have a heart attack when Barnett said that. It was a priceless moment of facial expressions as she struggled to cope with the idea he was expressing. Honestly, I’m still laughing writing about it here. It was only afterward I was reminded that she is co-sponsor in the creation of a new government organization.

The Department of Peace.

Good. The whole concept of a Department of Peace amounts to institutionalizing antiwar activists on the Federal payroll to try and obstruct foreign policy and erode national security for the benefit of unfriendly and undemocratic foreign states. If Bashir Assad and Hugo Chavez want foreign agents to lobby Congress, they can hire K Street lawyers like everyone else; we don’t need to have U.S. taxpayers footing the bill to promote far Left political causes.

Tom also weighed in on his blog on the experience:

Heh.

Just read this profile of Dr. (Gen.) Shimon Naveh, via Soob via Ubiwar.

….Naveh describes his last and perhaps most important military-academic project, OTRI, as a chronicle of failure. “It was a failure of the group and also my personal failure, but in a far deeper sense it was the IDF’s failure. The IDF has not recovered because it doesn’t have the ability, unless it undergoes a revolution.”Naveh, who established OTRI together with Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, draws on imagery from the world of construction to explain the project. “We wanted to create an intermediate level between the master craftsman, the tiling artisan or the electrician, who is the equivalent of the battalion or brigade commander, and the entrepreneur or the strategist, the counterpart of the high commander, who wants to change the world, but lacks knowledge in construction.”Between the two levels, he continues, is the architect/commander-in-chief, whose role is “to enable the system to understand what the problem is, define it and interpret it through engineers.” In the absence of this link, he maintains, armies find themselves unable to implement their strategic planning by tactical means. “Entrepreneurs and master craftsmen cannot communicate,” he says.Already in his first book, “The Operational Art,” published in 2001 and based on his doctoral dissertation, he described the level of the military architect: “The intermediate level is the great invention of the Russians. [The military architects] occupy the middle, and make it possible for the other fields, from politics to the killers, to understand, plan and learn.”

An interesting and to me well constructed analogy by General Naveh that rings true to me from what I know of the Soviet history. Naveh perfectly describes the peculair adaptive requirements forced on the Red Army by the nature of the Soviet political system, especially as it existed under Stalin from the time of the Great Terror forward ( 1936 -1953). Stalin wiped out much of his senior military leadership of the Red Army during the Yezhovschina in 1937 and decimated the junior officer corps to boot, leaving it thoroughly demoralized and rigidly shackled to political comissars who were, like the military commanders, completely paralyzed with fear ( the Red Navy officer corps was basically exterminated en masse).

When Operation Barbarossa commenced in June, 1941, the dramatic Soviet collapse in the face of the Nazi onslaught was due in part to Stalin’s maniacal insistence that Germany was not going to attack and that assertions to the contrary were evidence of “wrecking” and “provocation” – crimes liable to get one immediately shot. Even a high ranking NKVD official, Dekanazov, whom Stalin made ambassador to Berlin, was personally threatened by Stalin for daring to warn the Soviet dictator about Hitler’s imminent attack.

That being said, Stalin quickly realized during the 1941 retreat that he had debilitated his own army by decapitating it and his own judgment as supreme warlord was no substitute at the front lines for what Naveh terms “operational art”. Stalin the entrepreneur-grand strategist needed competent military architects like Zhukov and Rossokovsky to plug the gap with the craftsmen and Stalin not only promoted and protected them, he tolerated their dissent from his own military judgment and sometimes yielded to their concerns. Very much unlike Hitler who could seldom abide criticism or deviation from his general officers or learn from them. Stalin improved as a war leader from interaction with his generals; Hitler did not and if anything grew worse over time – as did the Wehrmacht’s tactical-strategic disconnect.

The above anecdote represents the rich level of depth behind Naveh’s offhand and seemingly disjointed references. There’s a lot of meat there behind the dots Naveh is connecting but the uninitiated will have to be willing to dig deep. I’m cool toward Naveh’s reliance upon French postmodernism but I admire the breadth of his capability as a horizontal thinker and theorist. However, Naveh needs an “architect” of his own to translate for him and make his complex ideas more readily comprehensible to the mainstream. I will wager that few Majors or Lt. Colonels, be they U.S. Army, IDF or Russian, read much Focault these days.

ADDENDUM:

The SWJ had an interview with Dr. Naveh on his theory of Systematic Operational Design in 2007

Dr. Naveh’s book is In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Cummings Center Series)

Joint Force Quarterly (via Findarticle) -“Operational art”

Jerusalem Post – “Column One: Halutz’s Stalinist moment“