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Colonel David Maxwell, who has probably forgotten more about North Korea than I ever knew in the first place, has an insightful analytical piece up at SWJ Blog:

Irregular Warfare on the Korean Peninsula

….This paper is written with the concepts of “military misfortune” in mind. In Eliot Cohen and John Gooch’s seminal work on military failures, they determined that militaries are generally unsuccessful for three reasons: the failure to

learn, the failure to adapt, and the failure to anticipate. This paper will recommend that the ROK-US alliance learn from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, adapt Irregular Warfare concepts to the security challenges on the Korean Peninsula and anticipate the collapse of the Kim Family Regime and the complex, irregular threats that collapse will bring.

The conventional wisdom would postulate that the worse case situation would be an attack by the north Korean military because surely the devastation and widespread humanitarian suffering as well as global economic impact would be on a scale that would far exceed any crisis that has occurred since the end of World War II. While that could very well be the case, there is little doubt about the military outcome of an attack by the north on the South and its allies and that would be the destruction of the north Korean People’s Army and the Kim Family Regime. Victory will surely be in the South’s favor; however, this paper will argue that the real worse case scenario comes from dealing with the aftermath; either post-regime collapse or post-conflict.

Maxwell’s operative assumptions are particularly good. I especially like:

….The fifth and final assumption is that while some planning has taken place to deal with north Korean instability and the effects of Kim Family Regime collapse, there has been insufficient preparation for collapse. Furthermore, in addition to planning for collapse, actiocan and should be taken prior to collapse in order to mitigate the conditions and deal with the effects of collapse of the Kim Family Regime. Unfortunately, despite some planning efforts tocounter specific irregular threats, the ROK, and the US in particular, has been distracted by the very real and dangerous threat of north Korean nuclear weapons and delivery capabilitiesproliferation of same while at the same time ensuring deterrence of an attack by the north. Deterrence is paramount and the nuclear problem is a critical international problem; however, successful deterrence over time will likely result in the eventual collapse of the regime and the associated security and humanitarian crises that it will bring.

In other words, not only are US and ROK policy makers not preparing for the most probable second and third order effects of a North Korean collapse scenario, but the status quo on the Korean penninsula represents a wicked problem that is essentially a trajectory toward a worst case scenario collapse.

by Charles Cameron 

A tip of the hat to John Robb, astute observer of emerging human dynamics and author of Brave New War, for the pointer on his Global Guerrillas blog today to this recent Tom Scott talk, in which a smart mob is not so smart:
Coming soon to a future near you?
 
[ cross-posted from SmartMobs ]
 

John Seely Brown, who is the co-author of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion along with blogfriend John Hagel and Lang Davison, is primarily speaking about education and learning in an ecological paradigm.

Note to self: I need to read this book.

That said, “pull” is the fulcrum for all 20th century orgs that hope to adapt to the 21st, not just public education. Hierarchies, including states, can no longer completely dominate, only aspire to generally arbitrate, or concentrate their powers in an asymmetric fashion. To do this, over the long term, requires putting  attracting the allegiance of clients and allies capable of taking independent initiative in harmony with the org’s vision rather than relying primarily upon coercion to force people to mechanistically follow orders.

Not sure that too many people in our hallowed institutions “get it”.

Interesting. I suggested something like this years ago.

….What the USG desperately needs is a national security equivalent to DARPA that can both engage in deep thinking and have the freedom to run pilot programs to enhance America’s strategic influence that can later be expanded by our traditional power bureaucracies. This would be far more than a just a federally funded think tank – RAND, Brookings, Hoover , Heritage, AEI, CATO, CFR, Carnegie, CSIS and others all do a fine job of policy analysis. They also give statesmen a productive place to hang their hat as an alternative to whoring themselves out as corporate or ideological lobbyists. Another one of those is not what the times require.

What I’m proposing is a lot closer to a cross between a soft-power version of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a clandestine service – one with the objective of developing innovative programs to maximize the influence of American values and promote “Connectivity ” in nations mired in the endemic, isolated, misery of the “Gap”. This is not what the USG normally does. The bias of State and Defense, State in particular, when dealing with foreign policy questions tend to be orientated toward day to day, tactical, crisis management….

Google appears to be trodding down that very path:

Google Grabs State Dept. Star Jared Cohen for Foreign Policy “Think/Do Tank”

Jared Cohen joined Google last week as the director of its newly created Google Ideas “think/do tank”-an entity whose objective is to dream up and try out ideas that address the challenges of counterterrorism, counterradicalism, and nonproliferation, as well as innovations for development and citizen empowerment. He has also landed a side gig as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on innovation, technology, and statecraft.

Google has now hired Cohen to set up Google Ideas, which will look for innovative approaches to some of the stickiest international issues of the day. Out of his New York office, Cohen will, he told Foreign Policy, seek to “[build] teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges.” As for why he decided to give this a shot in the private sector, rather than in the public sphere, to which these issues have traditionally belonged, Cohen says there are “things the private sector can do that the U.S. government can’t do.”

The big thing is the resources and the capabilities. There are not a couple hundred [computer] engineers in the State Department that can build things; that’s just not what government does. You don’t necessarily have some of the financial resources to put behind these things. It’s really hard to bring talented young people in; there are not a lot mechanisms to do it. [And] on some topics, it’s very sensitive for government to be the one doing this.

During the Cold War, DARPA was a great success, as government bureaucracies go, partly because secrecy freed it from the normal political and bean counting constraints. The other reason was that DARPA’s focus was primarily upon engineering types of problems. Technically difficult, innovative and exploratory problems to be certain, but generally not the sort of socially constructed or influenced “wicked problems“. Or “intractable ones” ( DARPA delved into technical problems that were, due to the technological level of that earlier era, also intractable, but that is still a different kettle of fish from socioeconomic, perceptually intractable, problems). It would seem that Google Ideas will be tackling the harder set of problems to solve.

Google Ideas is an entity to watch but all the observation will be detrimental to the accomplishment of it’s mission, as the nature of social wicked problems carry with them vested interests determined to defend the dysfunctional status quo from which they derive benefits. In some scenarios, with extreme violence. In others, with political pressure. There’s a reason these problems in the human realm go unsolved – sweet reason and pilot program rational incentives might not appeal to leaders of La Familia or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Google might also need a formidible Google PMC.

Hat tip to Larry Dunbar.

Artificial savants? Savant augmentation? The path to mentats?

Imagine the effects of  fine-tuning this crude stimulation with precision, then additionally doing “x”so as to amplify the remaining abilities, not simply suppress the contraindicative cognitive process.

Now imagine the potential effects of doing it on a systemic, societal, basis for a generation or two.

Hat tip to The Eide Neurolearning Blog.