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From Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition – Summary and Conclusions

….We also think the competition proved itself as a useful method for attracting and identifying talent within our burgeoning online community of strategists.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of professional, apprentice (like our grad students) and avocational strategists out there on the Web generating useful analysis, and, in a disconnected sense, you could say they’re all collaboratively competing for our attention with their blogs, sites, etc. 

But when Wikistrat pulls them into an online venue explicitly designed to foster that collaborative competition – directly, then we turbo-charge the dynamic by concentrating it to an unprecedented degree.  The International Grand Strategy Competition was a brilliant demonstration of that potential: no established “stars” among the 200-plus individual team members, and yet collectively they pushed each other to generate a constant flow of innovative strategic ideas.  And the longer the competition went on, the higher the flow and quality of those ideas – innovation feeding off innovation….

Wikistrat also has a new look.

From Wikistrat and Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition Update (Week 3)

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. Coming off this crucial third week (after all, we’re all about grand strategy at Wikistrat), I wanted to highlight some of the lessons that I think the participants should take away from this collaborative competition when it comes to crafting and selling strategic visions.

 

1) Survival is never enough

Every regime wants to survive, and that’s always objective #1, but it cannot take up significant space in a strategic vision, because the more it centers the strategy, the less wiggle room ensues. Remember: strategy is more about keeping choices available than shutting them down. Worse, a fixation on sheer survival tends to obviate exploration of motive, and rationales matter plenty. For example, if I were to ask you where you want to be as a person in 2020, you wouldn’t answer that you want your heart, lungs and brain to still be working, because those baseline goals are taken for granted. And even if your response started with your health, the real purpose of that statement is to mark off possibilities that you want to keep in play (“I want to be healthy enough to . . .”). So no matter how bad a situation is for any country, their leaders are always thinking beyond just getting by, because some vision of progress is required to maintain morale among the “troops,” who, if they sense no purpose or way forward, will turn on leadership that seeks only personal survival….

From Thomas P.M. Barnett and Wikistrat:

Grand Strategic Competition Update (Week 2)

…As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week.  In this second week, each team generated those two trajectories to the tune of about 10,000 words each, or close to 300,000 words across all the teams.  Naturally, a ton of interesting nuggets emerged, so here’s my hit list of provocative ideas.

1) US turns back toward Western Hemisphere as part of reduced global footprint, need to deal with drug/crime nexus, and desire to balance growing Chinese influence across region (BRAZIL1/Institute of World Politics 2)

Every new US president hits the ground running with the promise to pay more attention to the Western Hemisphere – and then promptly forgets the entire idea.  So far, Barack Obama has held to form, and yet the dynamics cited here make for a compelling argument.  A US that pulls back from the world and gets it own house in order must certainly look southward for some of its solutions – particularly on the disastrous drug war.  Brazil, as the IWP2 team points out, is the key dynamo of the region, so either the US recognizes that and accommodates Brazil’s ambitions, or it may find itself the odd man out throughout South America…

Time’s Battleland: Future grand strategists: Russia will someday be forced to outsource its security

Hailing again from Wikistrat‘s International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia’s long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New York University team (find their national trajectory here). A certain segment of the US national security establishment got all jacked by Russia’s short war with tiny Georgia in August 2008, seeing in that raw display of power a “resurging” military superpower. NYU begs to differ…

Shades of Chet Richards and Steven Pressfield.

From Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Wikistrat’s Grand Strategy Competition – Week One

Greetings from the Wikistrat team!

In the last 7 days we’ve had 44,097 actions within the wiki with new information being added at an average rate of once every 10 minutes.

The Week 1 Challenge

Competitors, organized into 38 teams by school or institution, have been assigned either one of 13 possible actors. They were tasked with writing position papers on the following five issues:

• Global Energy Security;
• Global Economic “Rebalancing” Process;
• Salafi Jihadist Terrorism;
• “Chimerica” – China-US Relationship; and
• Southwest Asia Nuclear Proliferation.

The standard of work has been outstanding and Dr. Barnett and the judging panel are hard at work preparing feedback and scores. We’ll announce some of those next time

The two fine organizations to which I contribute in my own small way:

Small Wars Journal Events Listing and Newsletter # 2

We distribute an extensive listing of small wars related events in our monthly newsletter – Number 2 to be distributed on Wednesday, 1 June. Sign up here for the newsletter and visit our Facebook page for an alternate SWJ events listing.

Wikistrat

Read Middle East Monitor for May 2011.

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