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ONE GOOD TURN DESERVES ANOTHER

Simon, who linked here today, pointed his readers to a superb article on cognitive methodology for intelligence analysis . In this instance, the subject at hand is the debate about China but the author’s point about nonlinear behavior has general validity.

RAND ON CHINA’S AYSMMETRIC MILITARY STRATEGY

This PDF file should be of particular interest to Simon and Eddie.

Analysts from RAND Corporation outlined information distilled from Chinese doctrinal writings on asymmetric warfare in Congressional testimony, suggesting that the PLA leadership envisions a war with Taiwan being ” winnable” and “containable”. The guiding strategic principles are:

• Preemption by surprise attack
• Targeting U.S. defense systemic choke points
• Use of overwhelming force on a few ” key points strikes”
• Avoid contestng U.S. military forces across the board
• Avoid threatening any other vital U.S. interest

The objective is to fight a brief, lightning-fast, local limited war which China presumes America will subsequently decline to escalate further. Amusingly, since these doctrinal writings suggest hitting PACOM assets even before striking Taiwan itself to achieve this political effect, RAND’s analyst notes:

” It does not need to be pointed out to this panel that the last time such a strategy was attempted in the Pacific the ultimate results were not altogether favorable to the country that tried it “

But he also noted the obvious historical example had been left out of these doctrinal writings. From my perspective, this analysis tells us several things about Chinese strategic thinking:

First that Chinese generals like generals the world over tend to like plans better if they ignore inconvenient realities – like China’s dearth of airlift and sealift capabilities to carry out a more difficult cross-channel invasion than D-Day. Or the reaction of the American public to a sneak attack on the U.S. Navy. Or Taiwan’s ability to repel an invasion. Or…or….or….

Secondly, the generals are politically obligated by the CCP leadership to come up with something that has a hope of achieving reunification of Taiwan on Chinese terms. Considering this whole strategy is premised on ” We can’t win a major with the United States but here’s how we’ll risk one anyway” the overriding importance to China’s rulers of preventing formal Taiwanese independence should be obvious. It’s not just a vital interest but the paramount one.

Third, the Chinese are not stupid. If we ( from their viewpoint) permit Taiwan to back Beijing into a corner they will strike first and most likely it is going to hurt. They are well aware of our systemic weaknesses and the tendency we have to neglect the unglamorous basics or build sufficient redundancy into our critical systems to weather a crisis. Moreover, they aren’t the only people who’ve noticed.

The first strategic reality that needs to be understood is that the entire globe is an asymmetric position relative to the United States and that other nations will act accordingly. This is why we need an ” Asian NATO” – there are too many potential conflicts in Asia between great regional powers where the United States cannot help but be dragged in if war breaks out. We need to cool these incipient rivalries down before they acquire irreversible momentum.

POSTSCRIPT:

Eddie too has been mulling over China.

SMALL WARS AND LARGE IDEAS

Myke Cole was kind enough to draw my attention to several journals which I think will be of great interest to my readers, scholars, members of the Armed Services and a number of my fellow bloggers. I have already added them into my regular reading list alongside Parameters, Studies in Intelligence, Foreign Policy and similar periodicals and you should too:

Small Wars Journal (PDF)

I recommend ” Reinventing the Counterinsurgency Wheel” by Major Adam Strickland, USMC). Small Wars also has its own blog.

On Point

Which carries articles by such well known national security authors as Dr. Chet Richards and Michael ” Anonymous” Scheuer.

Myke’s writing can/will be found in both journals as well as at the highly regarded Defense & the National Interest site.

THE ECONOMICS OF HORIZONTAL THINKING [ UPDATED]

Some time ago, I did a three-part series on cognition that dealt with vertical and horizontal thinking and their relationship to the generation of insight. I haven’t touched the subject much since then until today when I accidentally stumbled across a reference to the Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Lucas and his paper ” The Mechanics of Economic Development” ( not available online as far as I can determine -sorry. Here’s someone else applying his ideas).

Dr. Lucas argues that a high density of creative people, broadly defined as to include conceptualizers, executors and venture capital financiers, tend to form clusters with high productivity and knowledge spillovers. Ideas flow faster and translate into action and tangible goods or services more effciently as a result.

What is happening in the “cluster” ? You have networks facilitating horizontal thinking that would tend to become, in a probalistic sense, more productive as they grow more complex over time with the nodes forming ever more numerous links. Presumably, this process would be subject to the law of diminishing returns; human attention is finite. Concentration of talent in one location eventually will bid up its value elsewhere with smaller, competing, geographic clusters. Population density imposes a cost of living/lifestyle threshold that varies in terms of individual psychology. On the margins, some talent will always be deciding to leave as conditions change for the cluster.

The blogosphere is itself a ” virtual cluster” with blogs tending to form “ koinon” – a phenomena which often is obscured rather than revealed by blogrolls. Koinonia combined with the ubquitous use of search tools like Technorati , Google Blog Search and others would tend to distribute some of the benefits Lucas proposes, at least potentially when people begin trying harvest the blogosphere.

We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do – and of understanding what we’re doing.

UPDATE:

Must be the day of the Dismal Science. Dr. Von is posting on the cutting edge today –
” Econophysics“:

“Further evidence of deep links between physical systems and economic models have also been discovered. In the September issue of Physics Today, an article entitled “Is Economics the Next Physical Science?” is featured. Yale professor Martin Shubik and Santa Fe Institute researchers Doyne Farmer and Eric Smith have been working on econophysics, where well-established mathematical methods used by physicists over many years have been used to establish better dynamical economic models. For example, the study of chaotic systems in physical systems as economic analogs in the sense that an economic market can follow very different paths if there are relatively minor changes in the initial conditions of the market. The mathematics used in this type of analysis follows techniques used in physics. The observation of numerous power laws in physical systems and networks (i.e. scale-free networks) over a number of years has led to more refined analysis tools, which are now being used to understand newly discovered power laws in economic theory. These power laws include analysis of price movement in stocks over short periods of time as well as income distributions in capitalistic economies. Production and distribution networks of large corporations have been shown to follow characteristic power laws associated with scale-free networks. What may seem like random trading patterns in the stock market that lead to market swings and patterns may be analogous to random motions of many-body systems that show emergent behavior. Statistical mechanics relationships are being used to study various types of economic models (since probability distribution functions rule). “

And Dan coincidentally, has a very intriguing real-life example of unanticipated emergent behavior in a virtual reality platform.

Damn, that worked out well ! My Koinon is on fire today ;o)

SHORTER RECOMMENDED READING

Younghusband at Coming Anarchy – posts his review of Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and The Stone while Curzon defiantly crossbreeds sociobiology and geopolitics.

William Arkin of Early Warning on “CONPLAN 0400” – a WMD location exercise. Of course, if there really was a WMD to locate without causing a public panic, they’d bill it as an exercise. ( Hat tip to Noah)

Dr. Dan Nexon of Duck of Minerva explains realist balance of power in terms of IR theory with the aid of tiny circles and Machiavelli.

Jeremiah at Organic Warfare on The Eastern Way of War