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[ by Charles Cameron — game and counter-game, FPS, Iranian nuclear attack ]

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Following up on two earlier posts [i & ii] on gaming a strike on Iran — from the FPS leagues…

The upper image shows “the designer of the first Iranian made Nuclear Energy computer game”, according to the tag-line in the Sydney Morning Herald game review, Iranian game promotes sacrifice and martyrdom — the image credit is AP.

According to the review:

In “Rescue the Nuke Scientist,” U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq.

Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named “The Special Operation,” which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to Israel.

To complete the game successfully, players have to enter Israel to rescue the nuclear scientists, kill U.S. and Israeli troops and seize their laptops containing secret information.

But there’s more: the game itself is a “tit for tat” move in an overarching game of games:

The “Rescue the Nuke Scientist” video game, designed by the Union of Students Islamic Association, was described by its creators as a response to a U.S.-based company’s “Assault on Iran” game, which depicts an American attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.

That would be the US designed Kuma\War game, Mission 58: Assault on Iran, described in the lower of my two frames.

As a Special Forces soldier in this playable mission, you will infiltrate Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, located 150 miles south of Iran’s capital of Teheran. But breaching the security cordon around the hardened target won’t be easy. Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age. Never before has so much hung in the balance… millions of lives, and the very future of democracy could be at stake.

Seems like it’s hanging in the balance still — the Kuma\War game was released in 2005, the Iranian response in 2007.

Dr. Bernard Finel, after a hiatus, has returned to blogging:

Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan

….Now, I am not really making an original argument here, but there is some truth here. In a very significant sense, a president (and, by the way, I hate the way he uses “Commander-in-Chief” rather than “President” in describing his role as a foreign policy decision-maker), any president, is not really a “strategist.” When Libya began to blow up, no one went to Obama and said, “Mr. President, what should we do?” Instead, ultimately, Obama was presented with a series of courses of action developed and proposed by his staff and various other agencies and departments, and the president was asked to select from a relatively constrained set of choices.

Now, obviously,  a president is not wholly constrained. He or she could strike out in a new direction, or demand more options, or whatever. But there is, ultimately, a lot of truth to the notion that the president is ultimately more of a traffic cop than a “policy maker” per se.

….And look, this is not a Cain/Perry problem alone. I mean, Obama was tremendously thoughtful and eloquent on the campaign trail, and in the end allowed himself to be borne along with the tide on the Afghanistan surge decision. The only case I can think of where this was not the case was Nixon who, essentially, spent much of his administration waging war on his own executive departments. I’m not sure that is a better model.

Richard Nixon was a genuinely gifted geopolitical strategist, albeit one who came with serious psychological baggage, the effects of which H.R. Haldeman and Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s sometime psychotherapist, strove to mitigate. Henry Kissinger, so valuable to Nixon as a diplomatic tactician, aggravated Nixon’s darker instincts as frequently as he calmed them (and in turn, Nixon deliberately stoked Kissinger’s anxieties to the point where Kissinger having a nervous breakdown seemed a possibility to WH staffers). I agree with Finel that presidential strategists are quite rare, but while there are more than just Nixon, they too had their share of problems.

Abraham Lincoln, who evolved into America’s greatest strategic leader by dint of circumstance, intelligence and latent talent suffered from bouts of major depression. Dwight Eisenhower, whose discernment recognized the value of strategic restraint in statecraft, had an explosively bad temper that spared neither aides nor grandchildren nor himself, contributing to Ike’s heart attacks. Even by the standards of politics, Franklin Roosevelt was unusually manipulative, deceptive and egocentric, lying with such frequency to his closest advisers that it is sometimes difficult to understand what FDR had really intended on certain issues, particularly in his last years when the weight of the war led FDR to procrastinate on making decisions.

Does strategic thinking come easier to those with psychological flaws?

[ by Charles Cameron — disturbing and keeping the peace, OWS Oakland, paradox ]

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Paradox.

It’s a bit like the koan where a zen monk is asked “is it the flag or the wind that moves?” — is peace what the meditator is dipping into, or is peace what the occupier / meditator is disturbing while the peace officers are maintaining it for the rest of us?

Here’s a photo taken a few moments / minutes later:

And in fact, the whole incident does seem to have passed off pretty peacefully (in both senses of the word): as the Chronicle’s SFGate blog put it in a caption:

Police peacefully detain Occupy Oakland protester, “Pancho” Ramos Stierle who was meditating while police cleared out the Occupy Oakland camp early in the morning on Monday, November 14, 2011.

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And the zen master said, “Neither and both: it’s the mind that moves.”

[ by Charles Cameron — analytic and esthetic game boards, HipBone Games, bishops in procession, Darth Vader, police,  OWS, clowns ]

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I’ve been frustrated for a while now by the size limitations of my DoubleQuotes format, with which regular ZP readers may well be familiar, and never more so than when trying to juxtapose images — which often have to be reduced to near invisibility to fit…

Today I had a pair of photos I wanted to juxtapose for you, and came up with a new format that allows me to do a better job with images: the Specs. That’s Brit for “the spectacles, you know, ie glasses, and thus by extension “binocular vision” — but it also references “spectacle” in the dramatic sense, and (again, by extension) “specification” in the sense of offering a minimal set of requirements for grasping the essence of a situation…

Here, then, is my first pair of spectacles:

The top image is from a Lutheran church function in Iceland [video and further details], the lower one is from the Occupy movement…  the hi-fashion specs in miniature in the middle are by Tom Ford…

And it seems to me they’re all dressed up for their respective occasions…

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Human Face of War by Jim Storr 

[Zen reviewed this book earlier here. I had forgotten that I wrote a rather long review at Amazon after finishing in January 2010. Perhaps Storr will gain a wider audience as a result.]

Mr. Storr’s The Human Face of War will be I predict, a book studied by military professionals (and smart policy makers) for years to come. Using straightforward prose, Mr. Storr seeks to provide a philosophical approach to war—as he says, “In practice we are concerned so much with war as with waging it.” Storr goes on to differentiate between war and warfare; where war is an “issue” with history and warfare dedicated to methods/methodology. Storr rejects notion that war is art or science, and prefers instead to embrace pragmatism and limited empiricism. He points out correctly: “Pragmatism has obvious application to warfare. A significant aspect of warfare is `a process of trial and error; seeing what wins and exploiting it.” Storr continues that “empiricism is not just trial and error: it is a logical process based on structuring observed facts.” What “works” will suggest a way ahead. 

Storr uses broad themes of what has worked and what has not worked in military history by explaining the nature of combat and tools and models available to the practitioner. He uses Clausewitz’s “dialectic of aims and means” in conjunction with Systems Theory to describe the holistic nature of military units; where effective/efficient output is dependent on input—where a good outcome is “winning” (as Storr repeatedly observes throughout the book, armies aren’t paid to come in second). Hence, organization of military units is fundamental; efficient/effective organizations are more likely to succeed. He observes: “Cohesion and collective performance indicate the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There is a systemic effect, and we should see armed forces as systems.” 

Storr is a proponent of forcing decision making to the folks on the ground using brief and succinct communications. His chapter on Commanding the Battle is excellent. Storr advocates lean command staff’s and dispersed decision making. “We should employ the best brains in small groups, rather than try to assemble a collective brain.” He points out that “when staff numbers are reduced, the effectiveness of HQ improves.” “Reducing staff numbers would increase speed with which they could get things done.” [Amazingly, Storr quotes a work from 1998 that reports a typical Western division commander has 600 people supporting!—and that number has, I’m sure increased in 10 years.] He concludes this excellent chapter making a distinction between technology and the human factor: “…the future is not digital: it’s human. What is needed is things that bind talents together as a team, not more bandwidth…given time, resources, open minds and not much money we could revolutionize land tactical command. The key problems are human, cultural and institutional.” 

Storr asserts that successful modern commanders are most likely intuitive thinkers and possess the ability to learn from experience. He suggests further the “tendency to learn is more critical. It implies a tendency to reflect on experience and to learn from it, to maximize the benefit of the experience.” This tendency is key to the development of “skills”. He encourages a “permissive man-management regime that allows those who can learn rapidly from their experience to do so.” At the opposite end, Storr makes clear the unsuitability of many leaders who use bullying tactics and fear to motivate. 

Storr concludes by observing that “institutional conservatism” inhibits armed forces from improving significantly during times of peace; that “the current size and shape of Western armies reflect issues that are not primarily related to warfighting effectiveness.” He insists that doctrine should be explicit, relevant,(descriptive and where appropriate, prescriptive), coherent, and practical. The short tours common in western armies harm team integrity—which is “huge”. Innovation is vital, and in many cases military members aren’t with a unit long enough to have the experience necessary to truly innovate. Storr advocates “experience is the best way to achieve practical coordination and overcome the fog of war, as long as the experience gained is positive.” He discourages the common use of lieutenant-colonels in jobs where a captain or major could function/thrive/learn; as these junior officers will have less experience when they are promoted and will have probably developed the habit of “referring decisions upwards, and hence develop little initiative.” 

According the Storr, the “human” aspect of war should take prevalence over technology. He acknowledges the utility of technology, but asks the reader to “…pause and look for a moment at the Vietnam War, which suggests that superior technology is not always the deciding factor.” [9-11 is illustrative of this point on the “terror” side; determination and box cutters wreaked havoc.] 

My review does not do justice to the wealth of information, insight, and counsel in Storr’s book and I quote him frequently because his style is better than a summary. This book was aimed at a narrow audience, hence the high price. When I began, I was concerned about Storr’ opinions concerning John Boyd’s OODA loop; but in late 2009 I rejected Boyd’s deterministic underpinnings of OODA—Storr’s pragmatic and partial empiricism makes more sense. OODA remains, in my humble opinion, a valuable and versatile methodology in both the military/law enforcement and business arenas. 

This book is highly recommended; particularly for junior officers and NCO’s—the price is high, but what you will gain will be worth the cost.

UPDATE 11.17.2011: Jim Storr contacted me and confirmed the issue of a paperback for about $40.