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Military education reformer and author Don Vandergriff has joined the blogosphere and  he is off to a nice start:

First of all, my hat’s off to anyone that ventures out and participates in something like the adaptability conference. It takes moral courage to admit, “maybe I can get better, let’s see what happens here.” More compliments to the person’s organization if the organization was willing to support and encourage its people to get better. Too many organizations focus on the short term profit and simply don’t want to lose control of its people, don’t take the opportunity to make a long term investment in making its people more competent and confident. These attributes are the hallmark of adaptability.

I use a series of different games and scenario based education to involve the students (or participants) in the discussion about how to evolve adaptability in themselves and in their organization. The students end up doing the talking and usually solving or finding the answers to their questions. Each and every time any group does these exercises, they assume that I, as the facilitator, limit what they can do, like asking question to broaden their assumptions and courses of actions, and that I will always say no if they do ask a question, like “can we have more time.”

I will leave you with this thought, after doing this approach with games and getting similar results from audiences the past 50 times, why do students box themselves in? What does that tell us about ourselves and our organizations, when we always assume the negative? How does this limit our “evolutionary adaptability”?

Facilitation is the skill that separates the great teacher, who leaves an intellectual legacy in the form of students whose worldviews they have been profoundly impacted, from the scholar who is merely competent in the classroom. The latter knows their field while the former knows how to elicit students to think about the field in a deep and meaningful way.

Not all “star” scholars are great facilitators because that skill requires a good deal of self-restraint to guide students to the point where they can make the leap to discovery and comprehension on their own ( genuine learning, in other words). A high tolerance for failure and error is required because students will initially go down well-trod blind alleys ( well trod to the instructor, not to the students – this is a perspective that academics frequently overlook) before realizing that they need to generate alternative solutions. Facilitation, unlike pontification, keeps students cognitively active and on-task with timely re-direction or adaptively ( modeling for the students) takes advantage of a student insight to create a learning moment for the larger group.

I look forward to reading more in this vein from Major Vandergriff in the future ( Hat tip to DNI )

Charles Cameron, who already blogs in his area of professional expertise at Forensic Theology, has added Hipbone Out Loud to his arsenal:

Understanding is modeling, mapping.

In this blog, I want to capture the glimpses I have of an extraordinary world, each glimpse being a tiny area of a vast map – certainly more sophisticated than any individual can generate with data visualization tools and modeling software, perhaps more complicated than a single culture can grasp as a collective – but important, as it is the matrix in which our individual and cultural life-maps fall.

You will find I favor quotes and anecdotes as nodes in my personal style of mapping – which lacks the benefits of quantitative modeling, the precision with which feedback loops can be tracked, but more than compensates in my view, since it includes emotion, human identification, tone of voice.

The grand map I envision skitters across the so-styled “Cartesian divide” between mind and brain. It is not and cannot be limited to the “external” world, it is not and cannot be limited to the quantifiable, it locates powerful tugs on behavior within imagination and powerful tugs on vision within hard, solid fact.

Doubts in the mind and runs on the market may correlate closely across the divide, and we ignore the impacts of hope, fear, anger and insight at our peril.

I’ve featured the writing of Charles Cameron here before because he produces posts rich in both complexity and depth, generating intriguing horizontal-thinking patterns that would have easily escaped my attention.  This another blog that I’ll be checking frequently.

I meant to note this at the time of publication but America now has only one surviving veteran of the First World War, Frank  Buckles, age 107:

Now there is only one. When Harry Richard Lucas died recently, Frank Buckles was left as the only American soldier who can recount his personal experience in World War I. He is the last surviving American World War I veteran. The Great War, as it was once known, is receding into ancient history, an era as distant from us today as the Civil War or the American Revolution.But every war lingers, long after the last soldier has died. Generations hence, the ghosts still speak to us, even if we no longer acknowledge the voices. Look no further than our current travails in the Middle East, in large measure a result of the political consequences of World War I, which created the political boundaries of those tribal regions. And in an echo of the current presidential debate, Americans in 1917 were passionately divided about being drawn into a European conflict we had little direct stake in, arguably less than we have in Iraq today.

When Mr. Buckles went ” Over There” the nation was still more agrarian than urban and both the Civil War and Slavery remained within living memory, neither the electric light nor running water were taken for granted and motion pictures were silent. The changes that Frank Buckles has seen in his lifetime surpass that of most 500 year periods in history.

WWI had been overshadowed for decades by the sheer enormity of it’s larger and more lethal sequel, the Second World War but historians are coming to see the Great War as a watershed in modern history, the tipping point at which the twentieth century went unpredictably, horribly, wrong.  John Keegan elegantly writes of the war, despite having been “curiously civilized”, cutting down a generation like stalks of wheat and twisting the survivors, turning them against the liberal and rational civilization of the Enlightenment. The war’s unprecedented slaughter desensitized Europeans to violence and cultivated widespread disillusionment with the traditional order, leaving a spiritual and political vacumn that would be filled by the malevolent dynamism of Fascism and Communism.

For practical purposes, that “Lost Generation” is now gone and the “Greatest Generation” that had to fight WWII and “finish the job” is going fast. Let’s hope the hard lessons they learned do not pass from memory along with them.

Michael Tanji points to this report by RAND to explain why the IC isn’t demonstrating any.

Part of the problem, I will hazard is a guess, is legacy security and pesonnel policies. “Deep understanding” of cultural-political variables of foreign societies requires a mix of academic historical, linguistic and social science expertise coupled with extensive “in-country” experience. Ideally, in the same analyst but failing that at least within the same analytical team. Aside from the collector-analyst division which could stand some erasure, many of the most useful sort of moldable, raw, talent – children of native speakers and Americans with extensive experience living overseas – have a difficult time getting through the clearance process.

Then, once these folks are in, cultivation of a strategic perspective – which includes synthesis, intuition and imagination and a long time horizon alongside analysis – have to become a priority over narrow analytical-reductionism and a “presentist” mindset. We have guys who do the latter already, they’re called journalists and the best of them do it very well. The IC should be playing at another level.

Theofanis D. Lekkas, a longtime Zenpundit reader who comments here occasionally under the handle “TDL“, is in the process of launching a fantastic Web 2.0 start-up, RealScoop.com, currently in Beta. In a nutshell, it’s a mediacentric Youtube mashed up with a voice-stress analyzer lie detector. Any celebrities or politicians you love, hate or love to hate ?  See what topics send them off the Richter Scale.  A few examples:

Senator Barack Obama

Vice President Dick Cheney

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer

And on a lighter note, Tom Cruise on a deranged rant about psychiatry

This is all in good fun and I wish Theo every success with RealScoop.com but there are interesting implications if this platform were to become as ubiquitous as is youtube or yahoo. Imagine, being a politician or public spokesman and knowing that your every word simply isn’t going to be parsed but run through a voice stress analyzer and transformed into a virally formatted visual clip. How would that change your media strategy ? Your deposition strategy? Being a laconic, strong, silent type might actually come back into style.

TDL may have hit on something here. Feel free to send him any comments when you peruse RealScoop or leave some here – he’s interested in your feedback.

Dave Schuler, a longtime blogfriend, had a post up the other day at The Glittering Eye that examined some commentary on the War on Terror by The New York Times and Dan Drezner, whom I have not read much lately.

Developments in U. S. Strategy in War on Terror

Contra Drezner the best description of the tactic is neither deterrence nor containment but fourth generation warfare. We’re attempting to get into the enemy’s decision-making loop and the NYT article is a very interesting description of that process….The methods described are all excellent method of getting into the enemy’s decision-making process and it’s about damned time. More, please.

It is indeed about damned time. Dave is undoubtedly correct that Drezner is getting it as wrong with his “containment” analogy as the NYT ( which did not even recognize the tactic used by the NYPD in the article was swarming) was with “deterrence”. Neither is really an adequate descriptor of what the NYT reporter is attempting to articulate.

As I read the original article, I see institutions (finally) experimenting with applying a variety of tactics – swarming, psychological warfare, IO, soft power – to create disorientation in our adversaries and a mismatch between their perceptions and their response. By intent or

by default, we seem to be moving, however tentatively, to getting on the good side of John Boyd’s OODA Loop dynamic rather than being hammered on the receiving end. As the article also points to a concern with the moral level of warfare, in undermining Islamist terrorist’s reputation for piety and impugning them with shame, Dave is correct in seeing progress toward the state adapting to 4GW.

This would be a rare good piece of news because it would mean that our security and law enforcement bureaucracies are starting to overcome years of inertia and are taking some baby steps toward becoming adaptive, learning, organizations that act from forethought rather than from “going by the book”.  When they internalize that “the book” isn’t really a book but a process of continuous creative destruction, we’ll be halfway home.

UPDATE:

HG’s World and Asia Logistic Wrap are also posting on the OODA Loop.  Thanks HistoryGuy99!