zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — thinking inside and outside the pack, Robert Wright, John Robb, Iran, outliers ]
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Robert Wright just closed his Atlantic piece on Why Bombing Iran Would Mean Invading Iran with an exchange from a couple of years back between Gen. James Cartwright, then Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Sen. Jack Reed:

Senator Reed: I presume that [a bombing campaign] would not be 100 percent effective in terms of knocking them out. It would probably delay them, but that if they’re persistent enough they could at some point succeed. Is that a fair judgment from your position?

General Cartwright: That’s a fair judgment.

Senator Reed: So that the only absolutely dispositive way to end any potential would be to physically occupy their country and to disestablish their nuclear facilities. Is that a fair, logical conclusion?

General Cartwright: Absent some other unknown calculus that would go on, it’s a fair conclusion.

2.

Look, I’m way outside my zone of focus here, but that phrase “some unknown calculus” intrigues me.

Maybe Robert Wright should read John Robb. Maybe that “unknown calculus” is in Robb’s post, Israel, Iran and the Poor Man’s Cruise Missile:

One of the Stratfor research “findings” (culled from the Wikileaks stockpile) is that Israel claimed its upcoming strike on Iran would be “catastrophic enough” to cause a regime change. This claim was made both to dissuade Iran from going forward with its program, physically eliminating their ability to move forward with the program, and persuade the US to act instead of Israel.

Running through all of the potential scenarios, only one emerges that makes sense.

A strike on Iranian oil facilities. A strike so devastating that it disrupts all of its oil production, currently at 4 million barrels a day.

How to do that? Drones.

Look, Robb’s piece came out yesterday, Wright’s piece came out today — and who knows how long the editorial process might have taken. So I don’t blame Wright.

3.

The point is, Robb doesn’t think with the pack. And that means he comes up with ideas the pack is blind to.

Outliers.

Here’s a legal question:

Do I own any of the airspace above my property?  If so, how high up? If not can somebody float camera-laden drones up to first and second story windows without breaking trespassing laws? How about following a person walking on their private property or in public by hovering uncomfortably  nearby their personal space? Flying over privacy fences or at an angle to peer over them?

Well, this story raised all these questions:

Animal rights group says drone shot down 

A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”

He claimed the shooters were “in tree cover” and “fled the scene on small motorized vehicles.”

Read the rest here.

Generally, laws permit you to film (but not always audiotape) people in public but not always where an expectation of privacy exists and certainly not via criminal trespass. If I own thirty acres, and your drone flies up to my house you have negated the value of owning so much property as to keep the public at a reasonable distance.

I can see how people might not find that acceptable and might start using strategies to discourage that. If I “accidentally” crash my drone into yours (Oops! Sorry) a court might perceive that as a risk entailed in such hobbies. I beam your craft with my DIY energy weapon and you are out $300 and can’t legally come on my property to retrieve it.

Or maybe, if I know who you are, I buy a drone and send it out after you. Or, if I have a screw or two loose or are from the shady side of the street, worse.

This could get seriously out of hand.

[ by Charles Cameron — complex problems and a future with drones graphically depicted ]
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A couple of interesting, arresting and relevant signs here…

The top one is a perennial favorite, and is far too simple to represent genuine complexity with any accuracy — but still gets something of the point across.

The lower of the two comes from a post by blog-friend Shlok Vaida today — I’ve cropped the original because the lettering would be illegible in my “specs” format if I hadn’t, but I encourage you to click through and see it — and also to visit John Robb‘s very recent post Drone Swarms are Here: 1 Minute to Midnight?

Shloky is an enterprising fellow — is he already printing up large quantities of those “Authorized Drone Strike Zone” notices, or (more likely because more efficient) waiting a year or four before printing them on a just-in-time basis?

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Are we wearing our time-crash helmets yet?

Via Shlok, cutting edge thinker, strategist and amigo  John Robb has launched a new site, add it to your daily “must read” list or blogroll:

Resilient Communities

What Resilient Communities .com does

How do you take control of your life in an increasingly unstable world?

1. Decide.  Right now, your success is akin a cork on an increasingly turbulent ocean.  Change that. Make the decision to take control of your future.  This decision requires a change in mindset and perspective.
2. Act.  Take steps to actively reduce your dependencies and gain degrees of freedom.  Learn how to produce what you need at a level that meets or exceeds what you currently buy.  Learn how to make an income either locally or online in a way that has meaning and substance.
3. Align.  Network with other people that want control and meaning in their lives too.  Learn how to build or join online networks with the people who have the expertise to help you become resilient and/or share similar goals.  Learn how to raise capital from that community to fund projects — or — how to build the online network required to design and build useful new products or services.
4. Community.  Build, join, or move to a local community that’s dedicated to building a resilient future.  A community that isn’t dependent on a global system run amok or vulnerable to disruptions.  A community that you can trust.  A community that rewards your contribution with reciprocal loyalty.  Learn how to form a community that’s worth living in and how to propel that community into a stable, bountiful future.

The goal of this site is to help you with every step along that path.

John Robb at Global Guerrillas had a nice primer on John Boyd’s OODA Loop recently and he put on a twist that I thought was very useful:

HOW TO WIN ANY CONFLICT

….I’m Inside Your OODA Loop

How does all of this apply to conflict?  The simple answer is that conflict, in its most basic form, is a contest between decision making loops.  The side with the FASTER and BETTER decision making loop wins any conflict.  Why?  They adapt quicker.   Here’s some more detail:

A FASTER decision making loop means that you accomplish a successful OODA loop quicker than an opponent.  If you can do this, you are inside your opponent’s OODA loop.  This means that by the time your opponent responds to your last actions, you are already onto your next ones.  Get far enough ahead and the opponent’s decision making process will collapse and victory is assured.

A BETTER decision making loop?  That’s question that can lead to endless debates and theory crafting.  My approach to improving a decision making loop?  Connectivity.  The more connected a loop is, the better the decision loop is.  Connectivity falls into three categories:

1. Mental — improves decisions by connections to a superior mental model of the current situation.  A superior model/strategy is predictive of events. It can tell you what data is important and what isn’t.  Weak strategies/tactics fall apart upon first contact w/enemy.
2. Physical   — improves observation through connections to better sources of data, cleaner w/less distortion  — improves action by making it possible to actually accomplish the desired decision in the real world
3. Moral — better orientation due to connections to strong traditions, extensive experience, and collected wisdom.  Training can help here.

The opposite is true also.  Damage an opponents connectivity, and their decision making loops are less effective.

One of the difficulties with discussing OODA is that many people who either oppose the concept or do not know much about it, will explain the OODA Loop only as “getting inside your opponents OODA Loop” in terms of the capacity to “go faster” -i.e cycle through your own OODA Loop faster than your opponent, making more decisions, taking more actions, leaving them in the dust, disoreinted and going into a downward spiral to defeat. Usually, misrepresented like this:

Ok, well going “faster” is a small part of it, but not sequentially and there’s neurological limits on this that arrive pretty quickly in terms of thinking speed in any case. Robb’s use of “BETTER” helps capture more of the critical and subtle qualitative nature of the “Orientation” box:

What are some of the possible effects of a “virtuous cycle” of better decisions?

Position yourself with more options
Gain new perspectives (“Observation”, “Orientation”)
Position yourself with the greatest comparative advantage (best option)
Lock in a comparative advantage
Position yourself with the longest potential decision tree (no quick “dead ends” or “cul de sacs”)
Change the tempo of interaction in your favor
Change the rules of interaction in your favor
Prevent a conflict with additional potential oponents
Lower your costs or increase theirs
Assure minimum gains
Arrive first
Increase or decrease the distance between yourself and your opponent
Broaden or narrow the field of conflict
Gain time
Seize or maintain the initiative
Define or redefine “victory”
Foreclose a critical option or set of options to your opponent
Force your opponent to act on your terms (“Check”)
Lower the morale of your opponent
Confuse, mystify or mislead your opponent
Attract allies or supporters
Increase your resources or potential maximum gains
Repair, remediate or replace previous losses

John is correct that “connectivity” helps you gain many of these benefits. 

Remember:

 “Being on the winning side is a lot more fun!”

ADDENDUM (Some interesting commentary on OODA):

Adam Elkus

I’ve Got the OODA Blues

Joseph Fouche:

Libeling Boyd

How Not to be Like Boyd

Who’s Afraid of Genghis John?

TDAXP, PhD

Variations of the OODA Loop 1: Introduction
Variations of the OODA Loop 2: The Naive Boydian Loop
Variations of the OODA Loop 3: The Sophisticated Boydian Loop
Variations of the OODA Loop 4: Pseudo-Boydian Loops
Variations of the OODA Loop 5: Post-Boydian Loops
Variations of the OODA Loop 6: Bibliography