An interesting new blog. An operator type, an Iraq and Afghan vet,  quesopaper blogging from AfPakland on situational awareness and much later in the post, on leadership:

Running To Contact

….I thought we’d cover danger in Afghanistan again by examining, “When Insurgents attack.”

A quick aside…over the years one develops a sense for explosions. Some are “ours”…outgoing mortars, rounds from a gun or controlled detonations. We learn the sounds of different weapon systems. A helicopter followed by a high pitched drone and several whooshes is an Apache firing it’s main gun and rockets. Whomp Whomp Whomp  is an M60/M240. Ma duece says Bum Bum Bum. Artillery is LOUD and has a pointy sound when outgoing. Incoming is more spherical.

We also develop a sense of distance and direction for the booms…it’s all part of our survival mechanism. Another aspect is awareness of our surroundings. We constantly scan and consider what to do if we are attacked …where is the nearest bunker or where is the closest safest place?

This sounds frightening, but we all do this. Motorcycle riding is a good analog. When riding we have to be aware of spacing. Scanning for threats and escape routes saves a rider’s life.

The sound that puts me face first on the ground are mortars wobbling towards me. They make a unique sound that I can’t quite describe. Sort of of a frantic flutter…the closest sound I can come up with is the rattle of a door stop when accidentally brushed. Rockets and their vibrating engine sound are also unnerving. If you can hear them flying, they are too damned close…

Very relevant to past blog discussions of fingerspitzegehful and the OODA Loop – a good descriptive narrative, in fact, of OODA working correctly. Theory is not the interest of the quesopaper gent, but his firsthand observations of COIN in Afghanistan are intriguing, for those interested in military policy or theory. Ideas that are often great on a whiteboard or ppt slide but may not seem quite as great once they collide with reality.

Another post from quesopaper, in the vein of theoretical rubber meeting the practitioner road:

What do they Need?

….indulge me while I inject some confusion into our clarity regarding Afghans. This is a paraphrased version of a Benedictine Grima tale from her field work. If one desires knowledge about AfPak, particularly the female’s role, Ms Grima is THE source.

The tale….Two men travel to village 1. While there, they commit robbery and murder. These crimes are detected by local police. The police debate their response, and decide to chase the perpetrators.

They enter the criminal’s village (village 2) where locals set upon the police and kill them. These villagers for whatever reason don’t appreciate nor require police involvement in their affairs. Villages 1 and 2 are content to solve crimes of any type within their own system of justice. In response to the police incursion, village 2 blocks outside access to the road preventing further police/outsider interference. Up the road a bit, the next village (village 3) hears of this incident. The road blockage makes them fighting mad. A village 2 v. village 3 mini-war occurs; people die. Why? Village 3 needs that road to survive or, shoot-some other reason. We don’t and honestly; we can’t know.

The point isn’t “should we” or “shouldn’t we” be here; that’s a different blog…Fact is we are here.

So let’s do this…Let me take you to a village. You comment below on how we are going to help….maybe we’ll all learn something….

Read the rest here.

This SSI monograph by Dr. Andrew Mumford should stir some robust debate in the COIN community:

Puncturing the Counterinsurgency Myth: Britain and Irregular Warfare in the Past, Present, and Future

Most of Mumford’s points are valid criticisms but I need to quibble with Myth # 1 The British Military is an Effective Learning Institution:

What sort of time frame is reasonable for “organizational learning” – that is, transforming a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic entity’s conceptualization and understanding of a situation and reforming and adapting it’s practices in light of experience? How fast can this really happen? An org is not an individual, two years while under fire does not seem slow to me. Am I missing something in Mumford’s argument?

Furthermore, I infer from the third paragraph that Mumford expects evidence of learning were for the Brits to have arrived in Basra good-to-go on COIN doctrine. Learning, whether in a person or org, is not represented by doctrine (lessons frozen in time) but rather a capacity to adapt to new circumstances. Mumford is on firmer ground criticizing British general officers for their blind assumption that they had all the answers on counterinsurgency  while the ragtag Mahdi Army bullied and ran circles around British units.

A monograph worth reading.

Hat tip to Lexington Green and SWJ Blog)

[ by Charles Cameron — parallels, opppositions, analysis, games, coincidentia oppositorum ]

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My friend Cath Styles, who has been developing an iPad playable version of my HipBone Games under the name Sembl for the National Museum of Australia, made a point I’ve been trying to make for a while now, with sweet lucidity, in a recent blog post:

A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.

That’s absolutely right, and it gets to the heart of my games and analytic practice — to see and acknowledge both parallelisms and differences, oppositions…

Oxford is the polar opposite of Cambridge as anyone at the annual boat race between them will tell you — yet they’re so similar that the term Oxbridge exists to distinguish them as a dyad from all else the wide world round…

Similarly, in the example illustrated above, Cath shows two items from the Museum collection that were juxtaposed by players of an early version of her game, and writes:

the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.

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Since the essence of my own analytic style (and that of HipBone and Sembl games) is the recognition of parallelisms and oppositions, I was particularly interested to see one group of early Tea Party folk reaching out to the emerging Occupy movement. Here, then, are two posts in which we can see the beginnings of recognition that there may be a kinship between the two…

Occupy Wall Street: Another View:

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?
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It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

That comes from a post on FedUpUSA, a site with the Gadsden flag as its web-logo that was [as “Market
Ticker”], one of the founding orgs behind the TP. It’s from someone who identified as a Libertarian Party activist.

Here’s another post from FedUpUSA, not so identified:

An Open Letter From FedUpUSA To Occupy Wall Street Protestors All Over The Country:

This is a letter to OWS from FedUpUSA, one of the original Tea Parties:
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We support you in exercising your First Amendment Right. We are outraged that any peaceful demonstrator would be assaulted or abused by any authorities.
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If you are protesting because there are no jobs— We stand with you.
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We are for a free economy and recognize that what we have now is NOT a free economy; it is not capitalism what we have is a fascist state or crony-capitalism. There is nothing free about doing business with Countries that manipulate their currencies to attract cheap labor. We agree that these jobs need to come back to America.
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If you are protesting because no one has gone to jail— We stand with you.
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Regardless of what is being said from the white house and media, we know that there are many in the financial district and the banks that have committed fraud and outright theft and we too want to see them prosecuted. We support the stop looting and start prosecuting.
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If you are protesting because everything costs more— We stand with you.
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We see prices rise in our food, gas, clothes yet our wages have stayed the same or have decreased. The Federal Reserve has bailed everyone out but us and not only are we going to have to pay for that, those bailouts make the price of everything else go up because it devalues our currency. We support monetary reform.
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If you are protesting because you are tired of our bought and paid for government on both sides— We stand with you.
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We are also against the banks and big corporations buying our politicians and writing laws that favor their special interests. We understand that our economy is broken BECAUSE of this and that all of our other issues will never be addressed as long as the financial elite control OUR government.
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We understand that these issues cross party lines and ideologies and effect each and every one of us. We also understand that these issues will never get fixed as long as we continue to let the media, the elite, and members of the government separate us by our differing ideologies.
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Only Together, can we Implement Change
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It is time, We Americans, put our ideologies in our back pocket and not let them separate us so that we can work together for this ONE COMMON GOAL: to get the special interest money and elite out of OUR Government and return it to US — the people.
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As long as the banks, largest corporations, and wealthy elite control our government, we will never have a representative republic and laws will continue to be passed that only benefit the few 1% at the expense of us 99
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Demand that NOT ONE MORE LAW gets passed until they pass:
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Lobby reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:

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Lobby any member of the US Congress outside of the district you live, work, or own a business.
Lobby a member of congress while they are physically outside the district they represent.
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Campaign Reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:
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For any one person, corporation, enterprise, group, union or the like, to donate more than $2,000 to any one candidate during one campaign period.
For any member of the media to deny equal access to competing candidates.
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These two laws will cut the control the Financial elite have on our government by leveling the playing field. You will have just as big as a voice with your representative as the big box retailer that resides in your town. Simply, it will end the Crony-Capitalism that is strangling our economy.
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I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people. After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians.

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FedUpUSA.org

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And we’re deep into John Robb territory…

What do you think? Do the parallelisms strike you, or the oppositions — or, perhaps, both?

FWIW, Cath’s Sembl version of my game looks like it is going to be a beautiful steampunk affair…

[ by Charles Cameron — childhood memories, computer history, creative thinking, analogy, bead game ]

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This menacing old pile, Horsley Towers — John Julius Norwich said of it in his Architecture of southern England, “The over-riding idiom seems to be vaguely Italianate Gothic, but in reality East Horsley is like nothing but itself, a grotesque Victorian Disneyland which has to be seen to be believed – and may not be even then” — was home to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I have special reasons to honor her.

For one thing, I grew up inside these gate-towers, in the last little house before the Lovelace estate proper began, and certain features of the first fields on the way to the big pile were my childhood haunts, the old oak with its dark and mysterious hollow wound, the clovered grass and cow pats, the small mound for boyish climbing, the bramble bushes with their delicious blackberries…

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But it is as a devotee of Hermann Hesse‘s great Bead Game that I want to celebrate Ada Lovelace today —

for she illustrates to perfection the importance of cross-disciplinary analogies in creativity.

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Consider this diagram from Mark Turner‘s The artful mind: cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity, based on those in Arthur Koestler‘s The Act of Creation (eg those on pp 35 and 37):

Hesse proposes — in his Nobel-winning novel, the Glass Bead Game (aka Magister Ludi) the building of an architecture of ideas in which the great works of human culture are linked — bound together — by analogies between them.

Beginning players of his Game,  he writes, learn “how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature.” As I wrote elsewhere, on a more complex level, Hesse speaks of scholars proposing materials for inclusion in the Game Archives, and specifically mentions someone who had been studying “the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar’s Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns”…  Hesse couldn’t possibly have known about it when writing that particular sentence, of course, but there is actually a book by Jane-Marie Luecke, OSB, entitled Measuring Old English Rhythm: an Application of the Principles of Gregorian Chant Rhythm to the Meter of Beowulf, (Literary Monographs, vol 9, U. Wisconsin Press, 1978).

Hunh?  So?

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Consider what Ada, Countess of Lovelace hath wrought.

She perceived just such an analogy — comparing Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine with Jacquard‘s mechanical loom, and writing:

The Analytical Engine … weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

That analogy between weaving and algebra was the great creative leap: from there to the adoption and adaptation of Jacquard’s punched card system in computation was the lesser step from insight to application.

And think about it: her mind moved unerringly between “art” and “science” — or more exactly, craft and mathematics — in 1843, to deliver a technological insight on which the mainframes of the 1970s still relied…

That, my friends, was a superb move in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game — and impossible without a well-furnished and agile mind.

[ by Charles Cameron — an antiquarian trifle — or two ]

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As you may have noted, I am interested in the mapping of complexity — and could hardly be expected to resist the charms of this woman’s heart:

Stirred, I thought back to the map of the manly heart that my old school tried to instill in me — I was in Blucher House under Peter Willey at Wellington College, built as a memorial to the Iron Duke on the same patch of scrub land as Sandhurst and the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane…

How safe and reliable this terrain appears, I thought to myself, when contrasted with “the Open Country of Woman’s Heart” with its “internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein.”

Although upon reflection, my time at Wellington was not without its moments.

When Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell escaped from Broadmoor, we were sent out in pairs on cadet patrol… myself and a similarly equipped companion, with our .303s and some blanks — ready at a moment’s notice to shout “Halt! Who goes there?” if the dastardly killer should pop out from behind one of our rhododendrons…