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From John Robb at Global Guerillas:

The US national security budget is nearly $700 billion a year (much more if the total costs of Iraq/Afghanistan are thrown in), more than the rest of the world combined. Unfortunately, within that entire budget there isn’t a single research organization or think tank that is seriously studying, analyzing or synthesizing the future of warfare and terrorism. Fatally, most of the big thinkers working on the future of warfare do their critical work in their spare time, usually while working other jobs to put food on the table for their families. In sum, this deficit in imagination will soon be the critical determinant on whether the national security bureaucracy remains relevant in a rapidly changing global security environment. That relevance is the key to its future.

From Fabius Maximus:

This has been criticised as dividing insurgencies into rigid categories – black and white, not accounting for the shades of grey found in all human experiences.  That is both true and a good thing.  All rules of thumb are arbitary, in some sense, but useful for practicioners who know their limitations.  Even the exceptions to this “rule” about insurgencies, and I believe they are quite few, tell us something new.  For example, the Malayan Emergency shows the importance of having a legitmate local government to do the heavy lifting (even though the COIN literature tend to follow the Brits’ view, considering it “their” win – not that of the locals).

The value of these kinds of insights was well expressed by a post Opposed Systems Design (4 March 2008):

A deeper understanding of these dynamics deserves an organized research program. The first concept – an artifically binary distinction between “foreign COIN” and “native COIN” – has served its purpose by highlighting the need for further work on the subject.

One reason for our difficulty grappling with 4GW is the lack of organized study.  We could learn much from a matrix of all insurgencies over along period (e.g., since 1900), described in a standardized fashion, analyzed for trends.  This has been done by several analysts on the equivalent of “scratch pads” (see IWCKI for details), but not with by a properly funded multi-disciplinary team (esp. to borrow or build computer models).

 We are spending trillions to fight a long war without marshalling or analysing the available data.  Hundreds of billions for the F-22, but only pennys for historical research.  It is a very expensive way to wage war.

When the Cold War was as young, the newest of America’s armed services, the Air Force, sought an intellectual edge over their venerable and tradtion-bound brothers and funded the ur-Think Tank, RAND Corporation. I say “funded” because the USAF brass, while they expected products that would justify a strategic raison d’etre for the Air Force to Congress, wisely allowed their creation autonomy and this in turn yielded intellectual freedom, exploration and creativity. The Air Force and the United States were richly rewarded by these egghead “wild men” who advanced nuclear warfighting and deterrence strategies, Game Theory analytics,  a renaissance in wargaming, Futurism and a multilpicity of other successes. Moreover, RAND itself became a model for a proliferation of other think tanks that created an intellectual zone for public intellectuals and scientists outside of the constraints of academia.

We need something like that today. A few years back, I called for a “DARPA for Foreign Policy” but the need is equally critical in considering the future of war and conflict as is taking a multidisciplinary, intersectional, insight-generating “Medici Effect” approach.

We can do better.

Wow-That-Was-Fast Department:

Wiggins extends the conversation on RAND’s origins as an inspiration for today.

Courtesy of Lexington Green:

Our British friends have become alarmed at self-radicalization of British Muslims juxtaposed with the “uncertainty”effect of the EU on the national security of the U.K. and the moral malaise of the British elite. The RUSI Risk, Threat and Security: The case of the United Kingdom  (PDF) outlines a scenario where a situation recognizable as 4GW, a situation that if left unchecked, imperils primary loyalty to the British Crown.

The authors, who include General Sir Rupert Smith, are UK heavyweights and this document has the air of a call to arms reminiscent of Kennan’s X Article or the Iron Curtain speech. Fascinating.

Herman Kahn was the “shock jock” of America’s Cold War nuclear strategists, who used irreverence and comedic gesture to hook America into deep thinking about the implications of thermonuclear war (something the editors of Scientific American, his bitterest critics, have yet to forgive Kahn). Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design recently pointed to a fantastic post on Kahn by a fellow Wohlstetterian blogger, Robert Zarate , “Kahn and Mann’s “Ten Common Pitfalls” (1957)”. Zarate commented:

Less known, though, are Kahn’s reports and memos, many of which are available on the RAND Corporation’s website. In my mind, one stands out:

Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann, Ten Common Pitfalls, RM-1937 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, July 17, 1957).

This research memorandum (hence its designation as “RM-1937”) was intended to be a very preliminary draft of a chapter in Kahn and Mann’s planned, but never completed, book, Military Planning in an Uncertain World. RM-1937 offers the book’s provisional table of contents.

Ten Common Pitalls examines a series of methodological problems that often hamper or distort the work of policy analysts. Kahn and Mann’s examination, however, is intended to be descriptive rather than analytical. In the introduction, they write that they hope RM-1937 will serve “as a sort of checklist” for analysts, or at least alert them “to the things to look for in an analysis.” As a bonus, the research memorandum illustrated (literally) each pitfall with a drawing by Kahn. These drawing, reproduced below, are quite humorous and give a sparkling sense of Kahn’s own wit and personality.

It’s interesting to me that both Kahn and John Boyd ( see the current Roundtable on Science, Strategy and War at Chicago Boyz) were intrigued by the implications of systemic, deep uncertainty, on military strategy and human cognition, with Kahn preceding Boyd in that regard by approximately a decade and a half. Both men frustrated and amazed their peers and were dedicated briefers who evolved their thinking through study, reflection, presentation and discussion who had difficulty getting their ideas into a final book format. Kahn less so than Boyd, as he is best known for On Thermonuclear War but there are many “unfinished symphonies” in Kahn’s intellectual legacy; important ideas, arguments and projections that were never developed to their full potential.

Abu Muqawama pointed to a  must-read essay in The New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna of The New America Foundation ( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors). This is a lengthy, grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative American decline and a coming age of superstate multipolarity with a critical “swing vote” being held by New Core/Seam states like Russia and Brazil.

“Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing – and losing – in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules – their own rules – without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Read the rest here.

My reaction to Khanna’s essay, distilled from his upcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, are mixed.  Clearly, great effort and thought that has been put into this project by the well-read Mr. Khanna and his Thomas Friedmanesque globetrotting reportage is nothing but impressive. Clearly, Parag Khanna “gets” that globalization is a dynamic and complex system with interdependent “frenemies”; which I infer that he splices liberally with geopolitics and  the hard cultural conflict of Sam Huntington. A synthesis of civilizational conflict and convergence.

While erudite, Khanna’s geo-economic/political argument regarding the inevitable decline of the liberal international order has been made before (anyone recall Lester Thurow or Paul Kennedy?) in the early 1990’s, the 1970’s, late 1950’s, early 1930’s and perhaps originally in the gripping angst of the Lost Generation of WWI. Perhaps even further, as Russian intellectuals of the Silver Age like Aleksandr Blok were already worrying themselves sick about ” the Yellow Peril” even before the Russo-Japanese War.  And as he freely admits, Khanna’s geopolitical model of three, contending global centers of gravity bears a strong resemblence to Orwell’s. Khanna offers some sound, if modest, advice for American policy makers though the soundness of his counsel is independent of the validity of his thesis. There’s a great deal of glossing over the longitudinal weaknesses of the EU and China and minimizing of  the adaptiveness of America in this essay in order to make the declinist narrative as deterministic  as it comes across.

That being said, well worth your time to pop open a cold one and read it.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Nexon has his evaluation of his former student’s work at The Duck of Minerva

ADDENDUM II:

CKR has an awesome critique in the comments section here.

Dr. HistoryGuy99 has entered the building.

Libby at The Newshoggers takes note.

protein wisdom rejects it as unwise – and I agree that the article probably reflects the geopolitical hopes of some NYT editors in their lighter moments when they are not too busy slandering Iraq War veterans.

Love fest from Washington Note.

John Robb puts on his futurist hat and engages in some imaginative scenario thinking (PDF) over at Global Guerillas. Note John’s comment:

“The goal of this brief is to get people thinking about the future in a way that helps them make decisions today.”

John has the methodology right. Most experts, habituated to the over-use of analytical thinking, will try to nit-pick scenarios like these to death from the inception , either reflexively or intentionally in order to avoid having to reexamine cherished ideological assumptions, instead of engaging in the thought experiment. This is the major cultural-cognitive reason bueaucracies and academic institutions are notoriously poor at thinking outside the box or anticipating anything other than directly linear outcomes of policies. 

Analytical-reductionism was a reasonable enough epsitemological approach for the 19th and 20th centuries of the “Second Wave”, “Mass Man”  industrial-bureaucratic nation-states. It’s not enough for the more heterogeneous, alinear, high-velocity, “complex networks as evolving ecologies” of the 21st century. We need other cognitive tools in our kit alongside analysis.