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RECOMMENDED READING & DESULTORY COMMENTS

“What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals … Improving Intelligence Capabilities- Part V.” by William R. Polk at HNN.

When I mention ” the bipartisan foreign policy elite” I’m speaking about people like Ambasador Polk, whose exceptionally distinguished career epitomizes that demographic in all its virtues, vices and emoulments, from a Harvard PhD. to marrying into the European aristocracy. He’s actually a throwback to what used to be called ” The Eastern Establishment” that ran this nation until the 1970’s. I disagree with many of his views ( at times strenuously) but his breadth of experience should always get him a fair hearing. The man literally worked with giants.

” A Cruel, New Canada” by Geitner Simmons at Regions of Mind

Geitner’s heavy responsibilities as an editor and writer no longer leave him the time that he once had for blogging but his occasional posts still stand out for their quality and intelligence in a blogosphere all too often devoted to the partisan squabble of the moment. Anyone just starting out as a blogger should stroll through the archives at Regions and see the level they should be shooting for.

As an added bonus, Geitner has actor Ian McKellan and noted historian Robert McDougall in the same post. Must be a Scotch-Irish day or something in Omaha :o)

” Cindy Calls for Volunteers ” Vanderleun at American Digest

This one is admittedly a minor triviality. Vanderleun is also by the way, a thoughtful foreign policy blogger and there are other posts of his I might have featured– but this one….psychologically…had the same fascination for me as a rubbernecking a car crash. I read it three times over and I still feel both appalled and filled with pity.

” Germanic Jihad” by Younghusband
” Rules are Made to Be Broken” by Chirol
” Stalin Was Right” by Curzon

Always provocative. Ever thoughtful. A sense of humor as well as decorum. Articulate in multiple languages – I read a lot of blogs but I hang out at Coming Anarchy.

Bruce Kesler, businessman, activist and columnist has been exceptionally prolific of late ( unlike myself) but I liked his ” Constitutional Common Sense” on the Iraqi Constitutional process

” The Case Against Withdrawal” by Bradford Plumer.

Relatively new to my blogroll, Brad, who has guest blogged for Kevin Drum has great posts and an intelligent readership to spar with in the comment section, if you are so inclined.

““Nashi” – building civil society or a Kremlin jackboot?” by Peter Lavelle of Untimely Thoughts.

This is Peter’s weekly expert round-up on Russian affairs. A definite must read for me as the American MSM coverage of Russian politics usually ranges from the superficially mediocre but semi-accurate to the completely worthless. Untimely Thoughts is a useful antidote.

Finally, if you are reading this on Monday, Mr. Critt Jarvis has strongly suggested that you check out Dr. Barnett’s blog. He only gave me tantalizing hints via email so I’m in the dark like the rest of you.

That’s it.

BLOGGER HOUSEKEEPING& MISCELLANEOUS

I see that my blogroll needs tidying. Too many of you people are migrating to new URLs these days – Marc, Col, Dr. Milt to name a few,and I need to add a few more voices who were kind enough to link to Zenpundit on their own blogs. I’m pleased that I can find a home on blogs that stretch from the neocon Right to the antiwar Left – either I’m eminently fair and reasonable here or there’s a shortage of blogs starting with the letter ” Z” or both.

Regarding this site, not a few of you have suggested Zenpundit migrating off of blogger to a more professional stand alone website and a number of you, notably Younghusband of Coming Anarchy, offered me assistance for which I am grateful. Utimately, I
decided to take the lazy man’s route and send Mrs. Zenpundit back to school and let her become my webmaster when she’s ready – LOL ! Right now she’s busy mastering HTML and something called ” cascading tiles”(?) – whatever, better her than me.

When things are far enough along I’ll give readers a preview of the new blog and solicit commentary from my technically learned friends out there.

I will have some posts up today but they are apt to be shorter and lighter as I am working on a new project for work, a powerpoint presentation tentatively entitled ” Perception, Cognition and Worldviews” that I would like to be flexible enough to use both with students and for staff development training seminars. My theory here is to try to create educational products that are self-contained in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy so that they allow the user to bring an audience up the entire hierarchy of thinking or just target particular levels of thought and experience.

MORE THOUGHTS ON REFORMING THE STATE DEPARTMENT PART II.

Link Preface

” Right-Bolshies, Magical thinking, Diplo Reform ” – Lounsbury

“Part I.” – Zenpundit

To continue (after an unpardonable delay), in this section I intend to explain the nature of State ” obstructionism” that Dave, Jeff and I have decried and how reform might mitigate it.

I am going to set aside a semantic debate about the political coloration at State. Collounsbury argued for small ” c” conservative. Jeff and Dave and I said ” liberal” or ” dovish”. I think I could make a good case for examples of liberal pedigree during the 80’s at the ARA desk but that’s not particularly important right now. As Matt said, clashes over foreign policy do not fit neatly into a Left-Right spectrum anyway which is true enough so I’m going to stick to bureaucratic imperatives instead.

Let us simply state instead that the premise is that the State Department’s senior civil service in Washington and the lower level political appointees follow the natural tendency of a bureaucracy to try to dominate policy making for their area of responsibility. Added to this is the self-consciously ” elite” culture of the Foreign Service, the wide latitude given to desk heads and appointees for their area of responsibility, poor to nonexistent mechanisms of accountability and you have a recipe for free-lancing. Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were both exceptionally strong, hands-on and authoritative Secretaries of State. Shultz in particular was described by Robert Gates as ” the toughest Secretary I knew” yet each man complained at length in their memoirs about subordinates and the bureaucracy at State attempting to go against official policy.

The NSC is supposed to act as a counterweight by managing the Interagency process so that one bureaucracy ( usually State but sometimes Defense or the CIA) does not run wild and deny the president alternative views. Unfortunately, as every happy NSC is alike – organized, methodical, unbiased, inclusive and enforcing accountability- every dysfunctional NSC is dysfunctional in its own way. Only two NSC interagency systems have really worked properly – under Eisenhower and Bush the Elder- all the rest from Truman to George W. Bush have teetered between impotently presiding over bureaucratic warfare to becoming part of the problem. Since as Col- correctly noted, the NSC process is reset anew by each incoming administration, reforming the NSC interagency process itself is a post for another day.

As far as State is concerned there are a number of additional reforms that I might suggest to reduce its capacity to obstruct administration policy without shutting down the flow of expert information from State that policy makers absolutely need to hear:

My first suggestion would be to get rid of the antiquated, geographically-based, regional desk structure which is where most of the antics and information bottlenecks seem to occur. The structure can be re-orged in any number of different ways. By policy or administrative task, regrouping regions along geoeconomic lines of development, category of relationship ( state to state, state to transnational body like the EU or NATO, state to NGO) and so on. The point here is to mainly break up the bureaucratic empires that prevent cogent advice from flowing up from embassies to policy makers and clear instructions from flowing back down.

Secondly, the Undersecretary should stop being the utility player of State who does whatever the Secretary thinks is important and become the formal, institutional, monitor of State’s internal bureaucracy who enforces accountability and ensures the flow of information.

Third, State personnel need greater experience and insight outside their narrow domain of international diplomacy. The world is far more integrated thanks to globalization than it was thirty years ago and while it was once sensible to let State steer most diplomatic relationships on autopilot, foreign policy needs to be tightly integrated with the perspectives from other fields, particularly economics. It would be a good idea for State’s fast-track, rising stars to do some early career stints- call them visiting fellowships, internships, whatever – at Treasury, the Fed, the CIA or NSA, the Pentagon and so on.

Another place where State could use broadening is in the messy world of politics to get a better grip on where key Congressional players on foreign policy are coming from. Spending six months to a year helping appropriations and foreign relations committee staff would keep State personnel attuned to American politicos and, I think, help the committee staff, Congressman and Senators get a keener understanding of and sympathy for State’s needs and the limits of the possible in diplomacy ( reducing the propensity for magical thinking during a crisis). It would be a good two-way educational street.

State’s culture and habits of mind go back not to the Cold War but to the Great War when the United States began to accept a wider role in global affairs during the progressive era and the 1920’s. The time for renovation is long, long, overdue regardless of whether Iraq is going well or ill or if the president in 2008 is a Republican or a Democrat. State is far too important to national security to be marginalized or left to muddle through on its own, making policy in ad hoc fashion in response to the overriding pressure of the day. It’s time to contemplate change.

COMMENTARY ON RESILIENCE & CONSILIENCE

Dr. Von, experimentalist physicist, educational innovator and an extraordinairily able writer of Federal grants, was moved to give some expert commentary on my consilience post:

“The idea of ‘resiliency’ is important in scale-free networks. While there are many nodes in any sort of complex network, whether social, business, electronic (i.e. Internet), biological (food webs, metabolic processes, etc.), or other, what makes a network scale-free is that some small number of the nodes have many more links than the vast majority of nodes (which only have a few links). These highly linked nodes are the hubs of the network, and in some sense are responsible for holding the network together.

From the standpoint of software, perhaps the biggest fear is the computer virus wiping out a company’s computer network. Of course, the obvious choice is to hit the network servers and routers, which are the hubs. And these hubs are the most obvious parts of the network to protect. But what one cannot forget is that if nodes on the periphery are infected, it is very difficult to kill the virus completely.

Now add in Wilson’s idea of ‘consiliency.’ How can a network make use of fundamental principles from a variety of fields to enhance the performance of the entire network? In everyday terms, to me this almost sounds like multitasking. One needs to have members of the network who have studied and are trained in multiple fields, or small numbers of individuals who know something about a lot of different fields…research shows this multitasking tends to *reduce* productivity if you take the individual route. I may be a bit off on this, but in network theory, there is a hierarchical structure to some real networks that was discovered in ~2002. There are naturally forming, self-emergent networks within networks. There is still a scale-free mathematical structure to the more complex networks, and they are now called modular networks. A large company does this by having different departments, which by themselves are networks of workers. But the hubs, department managers, perhaps, are the links between the departments (modules) to form an ever more complex structure. The Internet and biological cell are naturally occurring modular networks, and the more people look, the more this structure is found in real networks.

Modularity makes use of a variety of local information for the global success of the overall network. The fact that this occurs naturally through the evolution of many types of networks is intriguing. Perhaps this is what Wilson’s intuition was telling him. If I were a manager, I suppose I would encourage interaction between my department and others, to cross-feed each other with our knowledge and find out how to push the boundaries of our business.

This is one thing I wish happened more in schools, as Wilson also suggests in education, because teaching techniques and methodologies can be used across disciplines and subject areas…this seems to be an efficient and effective way of promoting horizontal thinking, because teachers can break away from ‘standard’ ways of teaching our own subject and learn some new ways of teaching from someone else in a different department. We need to take advantage of the departmentalized, intellectually specialized modules in such networks in order to help find new insights and breakthroughs. “

Von detailed some thoughts on network theory and al Qaida a while back as well. Before the Drs. Eide went on vacation, they posted on multidisciplinarity vs. interdisiplinarity models, which has some bearing on Dr. Von’s description of human ” modular networks”.

BEYOND RESILIENCE: THE POWER OF CONSILIENCE IN NETWORKS ( Updated)

A while back, Dr. Barnett and Critt Jarvis entered in to a “strategic alliance” between The New Rule-Sets Project and Enterra Solutions, which is the baby of Stephen F. DeAngelis to develop ” Enterprise Resilience Management”(TM). It would seem to be at once a concept, a service and a systemic software tool for organizations to efficiently manage dynamic changes in regulations, security, information flow and market environment. From Enterra’s website:

“Resilient organizations turn security, compliance, information integration and business process management from non-strategic cost items into the strategic components of a sustainable competitive advantage. The positive benefits of Enterprise Resilience Management™ range from increased valuation, marketability and corporate responsibility to a lower cost of insurance and lower total cost of ownership. Additionally, ERM assists in lowering potential damage to an organization’s reputation and critical assets. This helps to create internal controls and solutions that protect senior executives and organizations from legal liability.”

The target demographic are corporations, government agencies and militaries. I’m not qualified or familiar enough to discuss the software aspect but I find the focus on ” Resilience” to be very important conceptually. DeAngelis has written about his ideas on cultivating organizational resilience here and here. Like Tom, DeAngelis is a visionary writer so his pieces tilt toward shifting your perspective on old worldviews and like Dr. Barnett he understands that freely evolving complexity in systems has significant ripple effects – hence his making ” resilience” the core of his philosophy.

Why is this important ? “ Resilience” in free scale networks refers to how resistant the network is removal of its nodes ( removing a node lowers the efficiency of the network by increasing the distance between nodes or disconnecting them entirely). Corporations, government agencies – all groups in fact – are networks. Because most formal organizations in American society still carry the structural and cultural legacy of the industrial revolution they tend to be hierarchical, vertically-organized, culturally-rigid and are less than resilient. Take out key actors – the ” nodes” -and institutional paralysis ensues. Possibly collapse.

So the Enterra-NRSP partnership is really selling network efficiency and survivability. In PNM terms, engineering a robust defensive capability against System Perturbations that would allow an organization reeling from cascading effects to ” bounce back” from an attack. As I said earlier, resilience a key concept and quality in terms of importance. But what about…offense ? Or expansion of the network or the network’s radius of influence ? What about structuring an organizational network to gear its behavior, culture and strategic thinking in terms of “Consilience ” as well ?

Consilience was a term rescued from obscurity by Edward O. Wilson, the famous sociobiologist in his book of the same name that means a ” jumping together” or unity of knowledge. Consilient thinkers look for the common underlying Rule-sets in disparate phenomena ( all phenomena at their most ambitious) – like Horizontal thinkers they are seeing connections across domains but the interests of Consilient thinkers are directed at the root level – the fundamental laws, principles and axioms applicable to all domains. In Wilson’s words:

“The trend cannot be reversed by force-feeding students with some of this and some of that across the branches of learning; true reform will aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and the humanities in scholarship and teaching “

You can’t get a whole lot more horizontal than that ! What would be the advantages of building ” Consilience” in to a network’s structure, system and culture ?

• Survivability: Like resilience, a high degree of consilience in a network would be likely to improve the network’s longitudinal prospects by adapting efficient non-zero sum Rule-sets.
• Influence: By adapting principles, practices and concepts that other networks find analogous to their own, the message of the network has more memetic appeal by virtue of being more readily comprehensible.
• Compatibility: As with communication and influence, common Rule-sets make potential cooperation, alliances and mergers with other networks more likely as well as more harmonious.
• Adaptability: Members of networks with a consciously consilient culture are more apt to themselves become better horizontal and creative thinkers. Their OODA cycle may be faster because they are all – collectively and individually – seeing farther and to wider horizon.

How consilience would be designed in terms of software applicatons is something far beyond my ken but it would seem to be a fruitful conceptual field to explore.

ADDENDUM:

Jeremiah of Organic Warfare, who consistently has interesting material and provocative opinions on his blog, is on a related tangent here.