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John Robb has been thinking about tribes. So has David Ronfeldt. So has Seth Godin.

Why?

John Robb  writes:

If you are like most people in the ‘developed world,’ you don’t have any experience in a true tribal organization.  Tribal organizations were crushed in the last couple of Centuries due to pressures from the nation-state that saw them as competitors and the marketplace that saw them as impediments.  All we have now it is a moderately strong nuclear family (weakened via modern economics that forces familial diasporas), a weak extended family, a loose collection of friends (a social circle), a tenuous corporate affiliation, and a tangential relationship with a remote nation-state.  That, for many of us, is proving to be insufficient as a means of withstanding the pressures of the chaotic and harsh modern environment.

The advantage of tribal structures in my view, compared to hierarchies, markets and networks discussed by Ronfeldt revolves around the certainty of mutual trust as a psychological motivator, especially vis-a-vis “outsiders”.  Loyalty to all members of the tribe ( primary loyalty) is paramount which is not the case in hierarchies ( loyalty flows upward, downward not so much), markets ( nonexistent) or networks (potentially  non-reciprocal loyalty to hub). As such, tribes function very well at the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which means they are good insurance for physical survival. It does not matter if the tribe is one of blood or cultural heritage or artificial political, religious or military brotherhood. Militiaman, monk or gang member is irrelevant; what matters is the establishment of unreserved mutual trust as a core of personal identity.

The implicit trust present within the tribe and the flexible sense of authority gives individual tribesmen room for individual initiative to react, knowing “the tribe has their back”. They are a more centralized unit of power than a network but more fluid and mobile than a hierarchy. A tribe is a safety net or a bodyguard. Great enterprises require something else as an organizational form but behind a great enterprise should be at least some kind of life preserver.

Addendum:

Col. Pat Lang – “ How to Work With Tribesmen“

The Armed Forces Journal on the economic decline of America.

The author makes too many assumptions regarding China’s resiliency.  The opacity of China’s hybrid, mercantilist-driven, political economy makes estimates of it’s true strengths and weaknesses difficult. We know how many treasury bills China has bought from us but not the real extent of hidden debt, underemployment or inflation. China’s leadership did not vastly increase the size of it’s paramilitary forces in the past decade because they were confident that it would all be smooth sailing ahead.

ADDENDUM:

Chinese premier takes on politics 2.0

The New York Times had a major and significantly positive profile of former Speaker of the House Newt Gincrich the other day ( Hat tip to Nate). It’s worth reading. The NYT gets many things right about Gingrich and Gingrich nails many of the problems currently bedeviling the Republican Party:

Newt. Again.

 …..Now, as Republicans on the Hill begin to awaken from a November beating that left them semiconscious, Gingrich finds himself, once again, at the zenith of influence in conservative Washington. It is a fortuitous collision of man and moment. Having ceded the agenda to a Republican president for the past eight years (and having mostly obsessed over White House scandals for much of the decade before that), Republicans now find that they have strikingly little to say that isn’t entirely reactive – or reactionary. “It was like ‘The Matrix,’ when Keanu Reeves wakes up and his eyes hurt because he hasn’t used them,” David Winston, a pollster for House Republicans, told me recently, talking about the 2006 election that relegated Republicans to the minority for the first time since 1994. “We just didn’t know how to do ideas anymore.” Whatever else you think of Gingrich, he has always been considered a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking – floating ideas, throughout his career, that have ranged from giving every poor child a laptop to abolishing the entire concept of adolescence.

….Gingrich is all about offering, as he puts it, a “better value” for the American customer – constructive solutions Republicans can take on the road during the next midterm election season and beyond. “Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

Newt is a horizontal thinker with a high level of expertise in a number of fields and a considerable degree of creativity. As a political figure, he does several important things exceptionally well:

• First Newt conceives of politics in strategic, structural, longitudinal, terms.
• Secondly, Newt is an idea merchant. He has them and he is quick to recognize the potential of ideas generated by others. Often, Newt’s capacity for horizontal thinking leads him to appropriate attractive concepts or proposals that are neither “conservative” or even “political” and make them conservative Republican signature policies.
• Third, Newt excels at crafting and framing tactical messages. He regularly comes up with phrases  that have strong memetic “pull” or “hooks” to them and distill the essential idea out of a complicated policy and he can use this ability to punish enemies or promote his own side. This is not the same thing as being a great tactician. Arguably, when Newt as Speaker had to juggle managing the House, formulating strategy and tactics, the latter consistently suffered to Newt’s personal disadvantage. Gingrich demonstrated better tactical skills as a Minority Leader and especially as a Whip but he had far fewer distractions at that time.
• Fourth, Newt cultivates leadership in others. He makes connections. He educates. He gives his assistance freely and promotes the careers of proteges and allies.

This is not to say Newt is without flaws. Politically, for the Democratic Party, Newt is a “target rich environment” whose unpredictability in the public spotlight can generate incidents that become the story rather than the message Newt was trying to get across. However, lacking any official position, it is much harder for Democrats to represent any gaffe by Newt as coming from the Pope of the GOP. In fact, engaging Newt directly in public debate at this time, especially by a senior member of the Democratic Party leadership or President Obama, will superempower Gingrich politically and increase his influence and profile regardless of what they say. The mere fact they are saying anything confirms Gingrich’s status as a major “player”. Nor can they ignore him forever if his advice permits the Republicans to score significant victories.

Gingrich has his opponents in a familiar bind and I’m sure he likes it that way.

The chronically poor state of American public diplomacy has been a topic of discussion in the foreign policy-mil-national security blogosphere for years. As with COIN on the military side of things, pressure has built from conversation to a greater public awareness of the inadequacy of American public diplomacy toward strategic planning and lobbying for reform. Few people have been more active on this important issue than my blogfriend Matt Armstrong, who recently participated in formulating the….

White Oak Recommendations: Rethinking Public Diplomacy (Updated)

Over the weekend of January 30 through February 1, the Howard Gilman Foundation, Meridian International Center, and The Public Diplomacy Council brought together seventy people – public and private sector stakeholders frustrated with this demise and determined to restore public diplomacy as a viable tool of foreign policy – to discuss the structure of America’s global engagement at the White Oak Conference Center in Florida.

The product of the conference is a short, easily read document of common sense recommendations that would otherwise be in larger reports. All but three of the conference participants endorsed the report. Those who abstained did so because their employers do not permit even personal endorsements. The report is simple and straight forward, so much so that the endorsements run longer than the report.

Download the Recommendations here (26kb PDF).

Download the Endorsements here (84kb PDF).

Matt also organized a blogger’s roundtable with members of the White Oak Conference ( he was kind enough to invite me but unfortunately, I had a schedule conflict that day):

On February 19, I moderated a sixty minute roundtable discussion between Doug Wilson of the Howard Gilman Foundation and Bob Coonrod of The Public Diplomacy Council. Tara Sonenshine was originally scheduled to attend but had a scheduling conflict at the last minute. The participants were Pat Kushlis of WhirledView, Shawn Powers of Intermap.org, John Brown of PDPBR (and now Notes and Essays), Kim Andrew Elliot of http://www.kimandrewelliott.com/, Steve Corman of COMOPS, Jennifer Bryson of Public Discourse, Chris Tomlinson of the AP, and Danielle Kelton from PD 101.

White Oak-Related posts:

• Nothing New in White Oak Recommendations on Public Diplomacy by Steve Corman
• Reinventing America’s Public Diplomacy 2009: Step By Step by Pat Kushlis
• The Conversation by Marc Lynch
• A Proposed Strategy for Public Diplomacy by Spencer Ackerman
• White Oak: We’re going to need a bigger boat (for PD) by Craig Hayden

Read the rest here.

American public diplomacy is beyond broken – it borders on non-existent. There’s a great deal of building that needs to be done and the White Oak Conference was an important step forward.

Just read this profile of Dr. (Gen.) Shimon Naveh, via Soob via Ubiwar.

….Naveh describes his last and perhaps most important military-academic project, OTRI, as a chronicle of failure. “It was a failure of the group and also my personal failure, but in a far deeper sense it was the IDF’s failure. The IDF has not recovered because it doesn’t have the ability, unless it undergoes a revolution.”Naveh, who established OTRI together with Brigadier General (res.) Dov Tamari, draws on imagery from the world of construction to explain the project. “We wanted to create an intermediate level between the master craftsman, the tiling artisan or the electrician, who is the equivalent of the battalion or brigade commander, and the entrepreneur or the strategist, the counterpart of the high commander, who wants to change the world, but lacks knowledge in construction.”Between the two levels, he continues, is the architect/commander-in-chief, whose role is “to enable the system to understand what the problem is, define it and interpret it through engineers.” In the absence of this link, he maintains, armies find themselves unable to implement their strategic planning by tactical means. “Entrepreneurs and master craftsmen cannot communicate,” he says.Already in his first book, “The Operational Art,” published in 2001 and based on his doctoral dissertation, he described the level of the military architect: “The intermediate level is the great invention of the Russians. [The military architects] occupy the middle, and make it possible for the other fields, from politics to the killers, to understand, plan and learn.”

An interesting and to me well constructed analogy by General Naveh that rings true to me from what I know of the Soviet history. Naveh perfectly describes the peculair adaptive requirements forced on the Red Army by the nature of the Soviet political system, especially as it existed under Stalin from the time of the Great Terror forward ( 1936 -1953). Stalin wiped out much of his senior military leadership of the Red Army during the Yezhovschina in 1937 and decimated the junior officer corps to boot, leaving it thoroughly demoralized and rigidly shackled to political comissars who were, like the military commanders, completely paralyzed with fear ( the Red Navy officer corps was basically exterminated en masse).

When Operation Barbarossa commenced in June, 1941, the dramatic Soviet collapse in the face of the Nazi onslaught was due in part to Stalin’s maniacal insistence that Germany was not going to attack and that assertions to the contrary were evidence of “wrecking” and “provocation” – crimes liable to get one immediately shot. Even a high ranking NKVD official, Dekanazov, whom Stalin made ambassador to Berlin, was personally threatened by Stalin for daring to warn the Soviet dictator about Hitler’s imminent attack.

That being said, Stalin quickly realized during the 1941 retreat that he had debilitated his own army by decapitating it and his own judgment as supreme warlord was no substitute at the front lines for what Naveh terms “operational art”. Stalin the entrepreneur-grand strategist needed competent military architects like Zhukov and Rossokovsky to plug the gap with the craftsmen and Stalin not only promoted and protected them, he tolerated their dissent from his own military judgment and sometimes yielded to their concerns. Very much unlike Hitler who could seldom abide criticism or deviation from his general officers or learn from them. Stalin improved as a war leader from interaction with his generals; Hitler did not and if anything grew worse over time – as did the Wehrmacht’s tactical-strategic disconnect.

The above anecdote represents the rich level of depth behind Naveh’s offhand and seemingly disjointed references. There’s a lot of meat there behind the dots Naveh is connecting but the uninitiated will have to be willing to dig deep. I’m cool toward Naveh’s reliance upon French postmodernism but I admire the breadth of his capability as a horizontal thinker and theorist. However, Naveh needs an “architect” of his own to translate for him and make his complex ideas more readily comprehensible to the mainstream. I will wager that few Majors or Lt. Colonels, be they U.S. Army, IDF or Russian, read much Focault these days.

ADDENDUM:

The SWJ had an interview with Dr. Naveh on his theory of Systematic Operational Design in 2007

Dr. Naveh’s book is In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Cummings Center Series)

Joint Force Quarterly (via Findarticle) -“Operational art”

Jerusalem Post – “Column One: Halutz’s Stalinist moment“