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Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Where action is the attraction….

Top Billing! HG’s World –The Aftermath of the “Global War on Terror”

Historyguy99 surveys and comments on the multisite blogospheric discussion of civil-military relations prompted in part, by:

Richard H. Kohn – Coming Soon: A Crisis in Civil-Military Relations at World Affairs Journal ( Hat tip SWJ Blog)

This was the “must-read” article of the week so if you have not read it, here it is.

Steve Gillmor – Calming Up

Found this through Twitter after a few of Gillmor’s big wheel  Web 2.0 compadres began “following” me as well as John Robb and others in my blogging circle. An analytical riff by Gillmor on the intersection of social media platforms, high tech business, Dave Winer’s projections for Twitter, conversation among early adapters and so on. While I think there is an underlying discourse in there of content and modalities (“medium is the message”) I gravitated to it initially because of this section:

“Sorry, but it just ain’t so. We’re living in one of the most disruptive and ongoing storms of innovation we’ve ever not fully comprehended in realtime, and you only have to watch the fear and emotion spilling all over the highway to get a sense of the power of what is going on just off-stage. Twitter may appear to be a solution in search of a problem, or an eyeball machine with no business model, or just the latest rendering of high school for the techno-elite – but the panic you can smell means something”

An OODA Loop “mismatch”.

Wilsonianism debated: H-Diplo held a roundtable discussion  (PDF) on historian Robert Tucker’s Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914-1917  while Jeremy Young defends Woodrow Wilson’s reputation at Progressive Historians.

Right-wing Nuthouse –AMERICA’S SHAME

Rick Moran takes the administration and his fellow conservative bloggers to task on the John Yoo toture memo. I met Rick once, as he lives not all that far up the road from me and he struck me at the time as an eminently reasonable, “common sense” guy and mainstream “Reagan Republican”. His post only confirms my opinion.

Nick Carr – Follow the neurons

On neuromarketing.

In from the Cold – The Real Obstacle to Missile Defense in Europe

Former Spook on the liberal Democrats vs. NATO on missile defense.

That’s it!

John Robb posted the first part of a working paper that extends John Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral into Open Source environments. I want to draw attention to the third potential solution to catastrophic failure ( result of mismatch of rigid, hierarchical, bureaucracy with rapidly evolving, chaotic, environment) that Robb offers in his conclusion:

C) Decentralized decision making via a market mechanism or open source framework. This approach is similar to process “B” detailed above, except that a much wider degree of diversity of outlook/orientation within the contributing components is allowed/desired. The end result is a decision making process where multiple groups make contributions (new optimizations and models). As these contributions are tested against the environment, we will find that most of these contributions will fail. Those few that work are then widely copied/replicated within components. The biggest problem (opportunity?) with this approach is that its direction is emergent and it is not directed by a human being (the commander)

Some preliminary research in small worlds network theory indicates that very noisy environments will have emergent rule-sets. Human social systems are less tolerant of extended periods of chaos than are other kinds of systems because there are caloric and  epidemiological “floors” for humanocentric environments that, if breached, result in massive population die-offs, emigration and radical social reordering. History’s classic example of this phenomena was the Black Death, which created a general labor shortage that fatally undermined European feudalism. Because of this, military forces whether of state orientation or irregulars would be forced to react cooperatively and adaptively, however indirectly, toward a consensus in order to maintain at least the minimal economic flows that permit their military operations to be sustained.

Much like Zenpundit himself.

On a serious note, I really enjoyed the presentation of Sliderocket by Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated.  Sliderocket would appear to be a huge leap in dynamic presentation quality that should interest anyone who has do public speaking or briefing (Tom, Steve, John, Shlok…).

Signing up for private beta….

Dr. Chet Richards gives his take links to a review by Robert D. Brown III. on The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable ( my apologies to Mr. Brown):

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”

The scandalous malpractice, as Taleb shouts, is that the rules that apply to Mediocristan are too often misappropriated to understand and manage systems that don’t obey such laws, often at the expense of lives and immense fortunes. The most pointed cases involve applications of options and modern portfolio theory in which billions of dollars of investors’ fortunes are lost by the malpractice of Nobel “intellectuals” who should know better (anyone remember the tragedy of the Amaranth fund or the trading company Long-Term Capital Management?); the poignant disaster of the unsinkable Titanic; the current woes of Bear Stearns and the sub-prime lending industry; and, in Taleb’s case, the decade and a half long civil war in his centuries-long peaceful Lebanon, a war that he and all too many others sadly believed would end soon after it started.

How does understanding the black swan inform our understanding of maneuver conflict? Consider the martial arts version of the Ludic Fallacy offered by Mark Spitznagel.

Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life. (Black Swan, pg. 127)

John Boyd leads us to understand that conflict is often a non-cooperative contest for limited resources by novelty generating agents. Novelty is the black swan of conflict. When we become convinced that our side will win on the basis of strength or numbers, when we believe that the other side will follow our rules of engagement, we will be exposed to cruel novelty. This is precisely what Chet Richards describes as a disease of orientation called fixation: “…attachments to appearances, conclusions, institutional positions, dogmas, ideologies – pretty much anything that keeps the people inside the organization from recognizing that the world is changing or being changed by competitors.”

Recently, I finished reading Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World (Vintage) and The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece by Cambridge professor and historian of classical Greece, Paul Cartledge. Scholars of the classical period have to be artists among historians for it is in this subfield that the historian’s craft matters most. While modern historians are literally drowning in documents, classical sources are, for the most part, fragmentary and/or exceedingly well-known, some texts having been continuously read in the West for well over twenty centuries. The ability to “get the story right” depend’s heavily upon the historian’s ability to elicit an elusive but complicated context in order to interpret for the reader or student. Dr. Cartledge acquits himself admirably in this regard.

Thermopylae and The Spartans can be profitably read by specialists yet also serve as an enjoyable introduction to the world of ancient Sparta to the general reader. Cartledge concisely explains the paradox of Sparta, at once the “most Greek” polis among the Greeks yet also, the most alien and distinct from the rest of the far-flung Greek world:

“Again, when Xenophon described the Spartans as ‘craftsmen of war’ he was referring specifically to military manifestations of their religious zeal, such as animal sacrifices performed on crossing a river frontier or even the battlefield as battle was about to be joined. The Spartans were particularly keen on such military divination. If the signs (of a acrificed animal’s entrails) were not ‘right’, then even an imperatively necessary military action might be delayed, aborted or avoided altogether” (1)

“Plutarch in his ‘biography’ of Lycurgus says that the lawgiver was concerned to rid Spartans of any unnecessary fear of death and dying. To that end, he permitted the corpses of all Spartans, adults no less than infants, to be buried among the habitations of the living, within the regular settlement area-and not, as was the norm elsewhere in the entire Greek world from at the latest 700 BCE, carefully segregated in separately demarcated cemetaries away from the living spaces.  The Spartans did not share the normal Greek view that burial automatically brought pollution (miasma).”(2)

The quasi-Greeks of Syracuse probably had more in common in terms of customs with their Athenian enemies under Nicias than they did with the Spartans of Gylippus. Cartledge details the unique passage of the agoge and the boldness of Spartan women that amazed and disturbed other Greeks as well as tracing the evolution of “the Spartan myth”. In Cartledge’s work the mysterious Spartans become, from glorious rise to ignominious fall, a comprehensible people.

1. The Spartans, P. 176.

2. Thermopylae, P. 78.