Metaheuristics of War
(by Adam Elkus)
I have been thinking about the problem of the “principles of war,” and various military authors’ differing takes on the viability of the concept. This is perhaps the best way to respond to the thought-provoking post Lynn Rees fashioned out of fragments of our gchat conversations.
Principles of war remain part of military manuals the world over, despite the fact that historical work has exposed substantial variance in their content. Principles of war evolve in time. John Alger’s work in particular is very interesting on this question. The basic pattern was, as one reviewer of Alger’s book argued, a canonization of Napoleonic principles followed by a grafting of midcentury combined arms warfare onto those already canonized Napoleonic principles. However, this element of relative consensus proved to be short-lived.
There has been widespread debate over whether “principles of war” are still valid for the so-called information age or irregular warfare. Military theorist William F. Owen‘s praise for Robert Leonhard’s late 1990s information-age update of the principles caused me to read it in college, and I found it very enlightening if overly optimistic about Transformation-era technologies. The principles of war are also being perpetually re-defined in countless books, articles, military college student monographs, and PowerPoint slides.
The way principles of war became proxies for principles of Napoleonic warfare leads us to question if there can be principles of war that generalize. If we take Clausewitz’s injunction about politics seriously, then we realize while war may have a underlying logic everything else will vary. Hence the problem with Basil Liddell-Hart’s book On Strategy — it tortures every historical example so thoroughly until it yields to supporting the indirect approach. A recent criticism of John Boyd recently elucidated this point as well. Boyd indulges in the conceptual equivalent of German attrition strategy at Verdun to force military history to conform to his PowerPoint magnum opus. Not surprisingly, Boyd inflicts grave losses on his opponent but is unable to extract too much strategic advantage relative to his own costs.
To seek time-invariant principles of war risks indulging in a John Yoo approach to military history . Indeed, books like Liddell-Hart’s own Great Captains Unveiled waterboard great military personages like Subotai and De Saxe until they cry “I’ll talk! I’ll talk! I won because I used the indirect approach! Just make the pain stop!” Torture is immoral and ineffectual in public policy, so why apply it to military history?
So what to do? One solution is try to boil principles of war down to pithy nubs stripped of unnecessary detail that express timeless truths about the “best practices” of warfighting — and build a doctrinal scaffolding around them. It would prune even highly abstract principles of war seen in doctrine down to more defensible levels of abstraction. But this idea suffers from several problems.
First, we dramatically overstate our current ability to tell what is “timeless.” That is the core of Rees’ recent entry – we are far more confused than we believe. And if the current, aphoristic principles of war were enough, would we see such a frenzy to re-define the terminology? It strikes me that what defense professionals often seek is a way to take principles down from the 747 jet flight level to the granular world of practice. As a result, they often turn to vulgar novelty over tradition when they are really searching for a process that might help them navigate the mismatch between supposed timeless principles and the actual problems they face.
Traditionalists (often correctly) believe this desire for novelty stems from fads, pressure to conform to political or bureaucratic directives, and personal empire-building. But in the last 12 years there has been a sincere outpouring of angst from soldiers, intelligence analysts, and civilian policy analysts in the government sector who find that principle of war aphorisms are not enough. One might not agree with Emile Simpson’s contentious take on war and politics, but he wrote the book because so-called timeless truths obviously did not help Simpson do his military job in Afghanistan. And I have often seen Mark Safranski argue here over the years that the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare was necessary as a forcing mechanism to get the US military to adapt to challenges it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is tempting to respond to this by saying “they need to read ___ old strategy master I like and study military history in the subjective way I like until they can understand strategy.” But this is a recipe for indoctrination since “understanding” = agreeing with old strategy master + the aforementioned fuzzy and didactic approach to extracting timeless or eternal ideas from military history. Instead, we might introduce metaheuristics of war as a complementary concept to the principles of war:
Metaheuristics is a rather unfortunate term often used to describe a major subfield, indeed the primary subfield, of stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization is the general class of algorithms and techniques which employ some degree of randomness to find optimal (or as optimal as possible) solutions to hard problems. Metaheuristics are the most general of these kinds of algorithms, and are applied to a very wide range of problems.
What kinds of problems? In Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964, regarding obscenity), the United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote,
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Metaheuristics are applied to I know it when I see it problems. They’re algorithms used to find answers to problems when you have very little to help you: you don’t know what the optimal solution looks like, you don’t know how to go about finding it in a principled way, you have very little heuristic information to go on, and brute-force search is out of the question because the space is too large. But if you’re given a candidate solution to your problem, you can test it and assess how good it is. That is, you know a good one when you see it.
– Sean Luke, Essentials of Metaheuristics, (self-published lecture notes), 2013, 7.
Metaheuristics are not heuristics of heuristics, as Luke notes in a parenthetical comment. Rather, they are algorithms that select useful solutions for problems under the difficult conditions Luke specifies in the above quote. Let’s see an example:
For example: imagine if you’re trying to find an optimal set of robot behaviors for a soccer goalie robot. You have a simulator for the robot and can test any given robot behavior set and assign it a quality (you know a good one when you see it). And you’ve come up with a definition for what robot behavior sets look like in general. But you have no idea what the optimal behavior set is, nor even how to go about finding it.
The simplest thing you could do in this situation is Random Search: just try random behavior sets as long as you have time, and return the best one you discovered. But before you give up and start doing random search, consider the following alternative, known as Hill-Climbing. Start with a random behavior set. Then make a small, random modification to it and try the new version. If the new version is better, throw the old one away. Else throw the new version away. Now make another small, random modification to your current version (which ever one you didn’t throw away). If this newest version is better, throw away your current version, else throw away the newest version. Repeat as long as you can.
Hill-climbing is a simple metaheuristic algorithm. It exploits a heuristic belief about your space of candidate solutions which is usually true for many problems: that similar solutions tend to behave similarly (and tend to have similar quality), so small modifications will generally result in small, well-behaved changes in quality, allowing us to “climb the hill” of quality up to good solutions. This heuristic belief is one of the central defining features of metaheuristics: indeed, nearly all metaheuristics are essentially elaborate combinations of hill-climbing and random search.
One must use caution. When Clausewitz uses a metaphor, he does so because it helps us understand some dimension of the problem being discussed — not because a Center of Gravity in war maps exactly onto the meaning of the Center of Gravity in physics. Boyd does not make this distinction, and thus is vulnerable to criticisms from those that accurately point out that his interpretation of scientific concepts do not match their original usage. The level of abstraction I am discussing with in this post must be qualified in this respect, as I hope to avoid repeating Boyd’s mistake.
However, the following aspects of metaheuristics are still appealing in abstract. In many real-world problems, we do not know what an optimal solution looks like. We don’t know how to find it. We have a nub of information we can use, but not much more. Most importantly, the space of possible solutions is too large for us to just use brute force search for an answer:
A brute-force approach for the eight queens puzzle would examine all possible arrangements of 8 pieces on the 64-square chessboard, and, for each arrangement, check whether each (queen) piece can attack any other.
While hill-climbing and random-search are inherent in most metaheuristics, there are different types of metaheuristic algorithms for different problems with varying performance in climbing the “hill of quality.” Hence it is customizable and recognizes variation in performance of methods. Some methods will perform well on some problems, but will get stuck at a local optima instead of a peak when faced with others.
One gigantic caveat: the idea of peaks and valleys in the solution space is derived from the assumption of a static, not dynamically evolving, landscape of candidate solutions. A perfect example is the application of the Ant Colony Optimization method to the notoriously hard Traveling Salesman Problem or the use of genetic algorithms to optimize the Starcraft tech tree’s build orders. When the solution space you are searching and climbing evolves in time, algorithms that assume a static landscape run into problems.
However, this is also why (in more mathematically dense language) nailing down principles of war is so perilous. A solution that you might have used a principle of war to get to is fine at time T. But it loses validity as we shift to T+1 and tick upwards towards T+k. And should you use a principle that better fits war’s grammar in 1830 than 2013, then you are even more screwed.
The advantage of metaheuristics of war compared to principles of war is that, while both consider solutions to problems with discrete (not continuously shifting) solution landscapes, metaheuristics are about how you find solutions. Hill-climbing is (oversimplified) method of moving through solutions that exploits heuristic information, and random search is (also oversimplified) “try and see what happens.” The process of a metaheuristic involves a combination of both.
In contrast, principles of war are not really a process as much as a set of general guidelines designed to dramatically and a priori shrink the possible space of solutions to be considered in ways far more sweeping than hill-climbing. They imply a very, very restricted set of solutions while still being too vague to help a practitioner think about how the solutions fit the problem. Principles of war generally say to the practitioner, “generally, you do ___ but how you apply this is up to your specific situation and needs.” It has a broad set of do’s and don’ts that — by definition — foreclose consideration of possible solutions when they conflict with a given principle.
Yes, they are suggestions not guidelines, but the burden of proof is on the principle-violating solution, not the principle of war. It may be that many problems will require flagrantly violating a given principle. The Royal Navy’s idea about distributing its forces to deal with the strategic problem posed by early 20th century imperial geopolitics potentially runs afoul of several principles of war, but it still worked. Finally, many principles of war as incorporated in military instruction are shaped more by cultural bias than timeless warfighting ideas.
As noted previously, metaheuristic algorithms are flexible. Different metaheuristics can be specified for differing problems. Additionally, when we consider past military problems (which the didactic teaching of principles of war concerns), metaheuristics can serve as alternative method for thinking about canonical historical military problems. Algorithms are measured against benchmark problems. One can consider abstract “benchmark” military problems and more specific classes of problems. By doing so, we may shed light on conditions impacting the usefulness of various principles of war on various problems of interest.
I will stress again that the loose notion of metaheuristics of war and the the principles of war should be complementary, not an either-or. And they can be combined with methods that are more interpretive and frame-based, since you will not be able to use a metaheuristic without having the “I know it when I see it” understanding Luke referenced in the beginning of his quoted text. On a similar note, I’ll also stress that an algorithm makes up only one part of a software program’s design pattern. A strategy or strategic concept is a larger architecture (e.g. a “strategy bridge“) that cannot simply be reduced to some narrow subcomponent — which is how the principles of war have always been understood within the context of strategic thought.
That being said…….what about war in real time, the dynamic and nonlinear contest of wills that Clausewitz describes? Note the distinction between the idea of principles of war that reasonably explain a past collection of military problems/offer guidance to understanding reasonably well-known military problems and the conceptual ability to understand the underlying dynamics of a specific present or future military contest.
The principle of objective, unity of command, or mass will not tell you much about the context of the strategic dilemma Robert E. Lee faced as a Confederate commander because geography, technology, ideology, state policy, the choices of neutral states, etc all structured his decision. They are much better when applied to the general class of problem that Lee’s dilemma could be abstracted into.
This is the difference between Clausewitz’s “ideal” and “real” war. Ideal war lacks the constraints and context of real war, and real war is something more than the sum of its parts. For example, maneuverists often argued that the US should implement an German-style elastic defense to defeat the Soviets in Central Europe. But such an solution, while perhaps valid in the abstract, would not be tolerated by European coalition partners that sought to avoid another spate of WWII-like demolition of their homelands.
Principles of war tell us very little about the Trinity’s notion of passion, reason, and chance, or the very political, economic, geographic, and technological conditions that might allow us to understand how Clausewitz’s two interacting “duel” partners move from the start of the match to conclusion. We need to think about how the duel plays out in time. And for reasons already explained metaheuristics also have some big limitations of their own with respect to dynamically evolving solution spaces.
An entirely different set of conceptual tools is needed, but that’s a problem for another post. For now, I leave you with a NetLogo implementation of Particle Swarm Optimization. Look at those NetLogo turtles go!!
December 23rd, 2013 at 3:02 pm
“Figuration, then, assembles a world out of fragments of present and remembered sensation. Abstraction takes these figurations and sorts them into categories, then tries to relate the categories to one another. It’s when the life of abstraction becomes richly developed enough that there emerges a third kind of thinking, which we can call reflection. Reflection is thinking about thinking: stepping outside the world constructed by figuration to think about how figurations are created from raw sensation, stepping outside the cascading categories created by abstraction to think about where those categories came from and how well or poorly they fit the sensations and figurations they’re meant to categorize. Where figuration tells stories and abstraction creates theories, reflection can lead in several directions. Done capably, it yields wisdom; done clumsily, it plunges into self-referential tailchasing; pushed too far, it can all too easily end in madness.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/11/toward-green-future-part-two-age-of.html
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:05 pm
“but will get stuck at a local optima instead of a peak when faced with others”
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so mix it up by starting with a fat tailed global search like the Levy flight
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight
and when you zero in the target than go to the hill climbing
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You might consider this similar to Lynn C. Rees approach:
jeng == hardware == routine == left brain
chi == software == project == right brain
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or vary when you use each or switch back and forth to account for the “plasticity”
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:11 pm
Gurray,
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That sort of stuff, along with NK-model, likely to be covered in future posts.
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:13 pm
….and my point in regards to that specific sentence is that performance of various metaheuristics depends on the type of problem. But hill-climbing and random search are two core components seen in many different specific metaheuristic algorithms.
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:19 pm
I’ve got an idea . . . why not consider Clausewitz’s general theory of war, instead of consistently trying to avoid it?
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Emile Simpson’s book links strategic narrative with Clausewitz in a very basic way and thus is worthy of the praise it has received. An open door to adding the work of Venkatesh Rao to the general theory . . . imo.
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Regarding Afghanistan, the basic problem from a Clausewitzian perspective is that the political purpose of creating an Afghan state that would pass Western muster required both resources and sustained commitment (both material and moral) far beyond anything that NATO was willing to commit to its achievement. That is assuming of course that such a political purpose (more accurately described as imposed “social engineering”?) is even attainable by military means, which is a highly questionable assumption given Afghan political relations. But then of course one would have to rely on the general theory to see that . . .
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:38 pm
Seydlitz89,
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I’ve got a related idea: given that core ideas from Clausewitz’s general idea of war is referenced consistently in this piece, why not acknowledge that I’m not avoiding it?
December 23rd, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Adam-
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I’m not entirely certain what you’re getting at here–you’re covering a great deal of ground and each time I read your post, I come away with a different idea. That could be a function of my feeble brain (very likely), or it could be a funciton of opaque writing (which, if that’s the case, means you’re in good company with CvC himself!). At any rate, if it’s the former issue, change nothing. If the latter, please consider brevity and clarity as principles of writing, whether or not you agree with the principles of war.
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Now, on to the substance. I diverge from your discussion metaheuristics before you even start discussing it. I do this because I, as a practitioner of war, reside in a world of human beings (fallible) and equipment (very fallible). Given that, I tend to be no different than an opperantly-trained dog–I do what works.
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Are the principles of war dated? Absolutely. But is there utility in teaching them? Yes–particularly in the early parts of military careers of young officers–if for no other reason than to teach a way to think about war. Professionals will move past MOOSEMUSS rather quickly, but they are worth keeping around in that they are an emenently teachable thing to teach practitioners of war.
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In your discussion, you bring up the Royal Navy’s distribution of forces as going “afoul” of the principles of war. I say that’s impossible–as the principles of war, if understood properly, are held in tension with one another. “Violating” one princple tends to confirm another. Suprise is can be held in tension with Security, Mass, Objective, and even Offiensive. Principles can be in tension at different levels, too–as forces can be strategically distributed, but tactically concentrated. Is that a violation of the princples of war? Or just a failure to properly think about the situation? Yet, don’t take me as a disciple of Jomini–I’m not.
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Furthermore, if you say the word “algorithm” to a corporal, he’ll think you’re about to talk about ManBearPig.
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I caution you against becoming too smart by half on this. Militaries are in a dreadful business–they live in worlds where decisions actually impact the real world–can determine who lives and who doesn’t, while academics worry about getting published. That’s the major issue I have with military academia–too often the words of scholars are divorced so far from the reality of those who rely on those words that they (the scholars, and the words) become useless at best, and an impediment at worst. I’d rather see a more close relationship between the scholar and the soldier, wherupon the the soldier can be enhanced through scholarship, and the scholar can better describe reality.
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My words here might be a bit pointed, but please don’t interpret them that way. I say the above with the utmost kindness and consideration. Perhaps a better melding of the soldier and scholar could occur.
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S/F,
Nate
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Adam-
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A response. That’s nice. What is Clausewitz’s “general idea of war”? is it related to the general theory, that is what Michael Handel described as Clausewitz’s “Gestalt” or “systemic theory”? What Andreas Herberg-Rothe calls Clausewitz’s “political theory of war”? These are the same thing btw.
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You’re not very clear on this imo . . .
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:09 pm
Nate,
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Thanks for your praise. I wouldn’t sweat the understanding part. I should have also emphasized in my reply to you and Carl that these blogs at Zenpundit and Jilt are also in part sketches of ideas that will likely be solidified in a future date. In some respects, your comparison of my increasingly opaque writing style to CvC’s is dead-on, because that book was intended to have undergone significant editing before publication. I’m not saying anything I write will ever be as a good as that book, but that outlining ideas before they are fully formed and edited can be pretty frustrating for both the writer and the reader. I’m happy that you want to read and comment, and demand nothing else.
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I have some agreements and disagreements with your comment about being “too smart by half.” On one hand, I agree with you about practitioner relevance. Which is why if I think something is particularly important as an idea, I probably will revise it to fit such a need. That said, I also think one of the major problems with defense discussion is that it often doesn’t consider deeper and foundational issues. Unfortunately musings about that sort of stuff also require a level of abstraction and scholasticism that will trigger ManBearPig thoughts 🙂
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:22 pm
Seydlitz89,
Your comment here is that I avoid Clausewitz’s general theory of war. Yet I mention parenthetically the common (Liddell-Hart, Kaldor, Keegan, and van Creveld) misunderstanding of the distinction between “ideal” and “real” war, the concept of war as duel, the Trinity (and not as the van Creveld misunderstanding), paraphrase Alan Beyerchen’s famous interpretation of the Trinity, favorably compare Clausewitz’s use of concepts to Boyd’s, and even — in my reference to Simpson — suggest that his book has flaws because it neglects core Clausewitzian ideas. I even dramatically qualify the entire post by talking about how both principles and my own musings neglect the need to consider “Gestalt” and systemic theory .
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I do not talk about the “general theory” as a whole because this post is not about the general theory. But it is very strange to suggest that a post sprinkled with parenthetical references to core concepts is somehow ignoring the general theory. If you are interested in my writing that more directly discusses core Clausewitzian ideas, consult my Infinity Journal back archive (particularly my piece in the Clausewitz special edition). This will likely be more productive than rehashing thousands of words I’ve already written in a comments section — particularly since your own useful posts on the General Theory at milpub already exist.
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Further to Nate,
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I planned to touch on why tension between various principles also proves confusing and forces a default to “what works” (an ill-defined notion that military history reveals is often quite perilous) but the entry ballooned to gigantic size as I discovered more and more holes, clarifications, and qualifications that needed to be plugged. Your points are well-taken, and I said at the end that the emerging idea I’m developing would really be a complement — not a replacement — for MOOSEMUSS.
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My concern simply is the following: we have much less certainty than we think about what is in fact timeless and useful for practitioners to study, tension between them causes problems, the principles themselves often foreclose useful solutions (hence the comment that Americans never follow our own doctrine 🙂 ), and it seems that everyone and their brother is trying to revise the principles. This isn’t to say they can’t be useful, but that they seem to be very much in trouble.
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:36 pm
In fact, further to the General Theory, given that Andreas Herberg-Rothe talks about the Trinity as being the core of the general theory, I feel somewhat justified in my own use of the Trinity as a shorthand lately for the core of the Clausewitzian canon. It’s also the aspect that critics (particularly contemporary ones) mostly misunderstand. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41802382?uid=3739936&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103164145947
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:42 pm
Grruray,
The more I ponder your analogy to Lynn’s post, the more interesting it appears. Thanks!
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:54 pm
Adam-
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As you are perhaps aware, the tendency for some time has been to use Clausewitzian concepts individually and separately, without any reference to their systemic nature, that is the general theory. This has led to the assumption by many that Clausewitz’s ideas are simply to be used (or not), that is comprise nothing more than a series of unrelated insights, which is the opposite of the general theory as presented in Handel’s Gestalt or Herberg-Rothe’s political theory of war.
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This concept of a general theory of war is very difficult to communicate, as I know from my own contribution to Infinity Journal. There are also obvious interests against the recognition of a general theory of war, since that would tend to reveal political purpose which is often better seen as hidden by those in power.
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Honestly, if you were referring to the general theory, it didn’t come across as such and I would have been one of the first to pick up on any such reference . . . maybe you assume too much of your audience.
December 23rd, 2013 at 6:58 pm
The remarkable trinity is the “capstone” of the general theory . . . according to Christopher Bassford.
December 23rd, 2013 at 7:06 pm
Seydlitz,
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I certainly do not think that Clausewitz’s concepts should be considered individually — without the capstone element of the Trinity to bind them and the idea of “gestalt” (which — aside from complexity theory-influenced thought, social science has mostly abandoned) they are confusing to the reader. To some extent this explains the sheer magnitude of misunderstandings of basic concepts, like the “mahdi of mass” slur and others.
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That said, as you also note, it’s very difficult to communicate the General Theory in anything less than a specifically designated post or journal article. I had thought that by referencing ideas that I suspect an Clausewitzian audience would be familiar with, they would pick up the scent. But sometimes that doesn’t always work out the way you plan, particularly within an already dense post.
December 23rd, 2013 at 7:10 pm
….as a parenthetical the very inescapability of the Trinity is a theme I’ve been building on for years. It simply cannot be escaped. Hence I have grown very skeptical lately of ideas about war that seek to develop clever institutional fixes to try to trap politicians into certain courses of action in regards to the formulation of policy. The coagulation of a political process, as part of the Trinity, is dependent on other factors that such fixes cannot account for.
December 23rd, 2013 at 7:12 pm
Adam-
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Perhaps communicating strategic theory is about as difficult as communicating strategy . . .
December 23rd, 2013 at 7:50 pm
“metaheuristics are about how you find solutions.”
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In other words, metaheuristics is about strategy, in that “how you find solutions” at the level of Chief (as in Commander and Chief of the U.S. armed forces) should be based on strategy.
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While the principles of war should be at another level, perhaps General, when negotiating the principles of war with the guys that are trying to kill you?
December 23rd, 2013 at 11:31 pm
Seydlitz,
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Well, that’s partially because strategy itself involves multiple layers. Re-reading Paparone’s chapter in this book lately has been revelatory. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB976.pdf. When I first read it, I felt hostile. But from fall 2012 to present I’ve imbibed a lot of comparative politics, social theory, ethnographic work (e.g. Geertz), philosophy of science and social science, computer science, complexity theory, game theory, mathematical optimization, and computer modeling. And Paparone’s attempt to try to create a sociology of strategy that is not biased towards one kind of strategic reasoning is fairly revelatory.
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Unfortunately, Paparone and others have had a lot more time to think about this than I have. So I’ll continue to try to iteratively blog here, taking the neo-Clausewitzian foundation and adding things on to it. I’m inspired by CvC himself, who looked for ideas in many interesting places and wasn’t afraid to shock. That’s the only way strategic thought happens.
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I’m under no illusions that it will lead to better strategic *practice*, but as a PhD student it’s my job to question what has come before, add to it, and produce knowledge irrespective of practical application. Though I suspect that some of it could be of value to people like Nate once it has been formalized and broken down into more practical language and structure.
December 25th, 2013 at 7:40 pm
“…as…as a PhD student…”
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Ha! No…it’s your job to get published.
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We’ve already had too many PhD candidates muck around in strategy, war, etc. too often the incentives for them include tenure, book deals, and noteriety regardless of the positive or negative impact of their ideas in the world of application (you know–where people try to kill each other and break each other’s things). In this respect, they’re little different than other types of defense contractors:
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They:
-are well-meaning
-have perverse incentives in their favor
-not held to account for poor product/conduct
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At least McNamara took a measure of responsibility for the whiz-kid-induced chaos he created. Where’s Doug Feith these days? Or Barnett? Or the phalanx of neocons who did so much to harm the country? Or the R2P crowd that’s in power now?
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And on the contrary…what practitioners do is likely to be more valuable to PhD candidates than PhD work is valuable to practitioners.
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Inhabiting a world where your decisions have impact sharpens the senses wonderfully…
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SF,
Nate
December 25th, 2013 at 9:59 pm
James Garfield (among others) wrote during the Civil War, “If the Republic goes down in blood and ruin, let its obituary be written thus: ‘Died of West Point’. That is still true: the American regular military establishment has been killing young Americans through its incompetence since the birth of the Republic. It is well that civilian control over the military was one of the bedrock principles of the post-1689 English-speaking world: a moron is dangerous as a civilian but a moron becomes doubly dangerous to his fellow citizens when put in uniform. Though the regular is dressed in his servant’s livery, give him a gun and he’s likely to forget which end of the leash he’s on.
The U.S. military does not live in a world of responsibility. It lives in a world of chronic irresponsibility. It may be that every American, civilian or military, has gotten into evading responsibility on a daily basis. But the military’s evasion is more dangerous: they get to play with lots of sharp objects with a proven track record of destroying the liberty of republics that goes back to the Sumerians before the inhabitants of Mesopotamia unlearned liberty.
While the infestation of dirty hippies into any nation’s body politic is toxic to its workings, the most disastrous side effect of the dirty hippies of the Vietnam Era was that their depredations let the military portray themselves as sainted victims who’d been stabbed in the back by civilian America. The military has used this cover to elevate themselves to a position of social esteem it has never had for most of the history of this republic. And this is despite how military bungling has as much or even more to do with the outcome of the nation’s recent military misfires as civilian bungling. Yet the regular establishment has evaded blame. If questioned, they can always retreat and huddle behind the flag and throw out the usual litany of age old defenses for military bunglers:
chicken hawk!
the civilians made me do it
amateur civilian meddling got in the way of the military professionals
we lay everything on the line and risk our lives while you sit there safe at home watching wrestling and eating your tacos
you don’t know what you’re talking about. my uniform, on the other hand, does know what its talking about
you don’t know what it’s like, only real men who’ve come under fire do
your line of inquiry pees on the graves of every soldier who’s laid down his life for this country since Jamestown
blah, blah…sacrifice
Whatever the validity of this well-trodden school of political defense, the men who created this Republic, many of whom were amateurish civilian bunglers on a scale that makes today’s crop of politicians look like Alexander or Genghis Khan in comparison, decided that war is too important to be left to the generals. Where one soldier has a valid complaint, nine rogues or politicians in livery can get away with murder by invoking the same line of defenses. Civilians, whatever their incentive structures (and there are many legitimate complaints as to how their incentives are structured), not only get to examine every orifice in our military establishment but are positively encouraged to in a republican system of government. It is the responsibility of the soldier or sailor living under such a system of government, if such a hot house flower is to survive, to bend over and take the probing with good grace.
Once men with guns or nuclear weapons grow annoyed and snarl as did young Pompey in the waning days of the Roman Republic, “Won’t you stop citing laws to us who have our swords by our sides?”, they have reached that threshold between citizen soldier and depraved Praetorians. As young Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, soon to be Augustus Caesar, euthanized the Roman Republic behind closed doors, he did so with the very best and most insidious of justifications: government is too important to be left to civilians. Many of Rome’s citizens agreed. And if the fall of the Roman Republic seems far away from today’s world, remember that it never seemed far away from the minds of the founders of this Republic.
December 25th, 2013 at 9:13 pm
Unfortunately, some of the sharpest decisionmakers under fire don’t have the foresight or insight to write these things down or think them through for the benefit of future practitioners.
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In a discussion elsewhere I pointed out that in roughly 5000 years of organized warfare on land it took 2500+ years to get a Sun Tzu and then another 2000 years for a Carl von Clausewitz. The second and third tier strategic thinkers who have valuable things to say would probably not fill up a greyhound bus.
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This indicates that effectively articulating the principles underlying strategic genius in war is very rare, more rare than acting from strategic genius in command. Historians can describe from a distance what they did but that is a poor substitute for great military figures explaining the crux of their grasp of the art of war. Relatively few tried and fewer succeeded in writing influential texts
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Not sure why this is. Prioritization of time may have been a large factor. Brilliance of intuitive thinking may be another – it is hard to retrospectively go back and unpack your victory-producing thinking in a moment of stress years later.
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Until we get more practitioners as effective teacher-philosophers there will be an uneasy relationship between scholars and warriors, though we should agree with Nate that advocacy of policy or strategy means that you stand behind and accept responsibility for your results, if integrity means anything at all.
December 25th, 2013 at 10:54 pm
“That is still true: the American regular military establishment has been killing young Americans through its incompetence since the birth of the Republic.”
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I have been called a romantic and an optimist before, but, “‘Died of West Point’” may not have anything do with incompetence. In fact it means exactly the opposite, which may be your point.
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But you can’t have it both ways. I mean West Point taught (I presume) how to fight a war against an insurgent west, but it was the “South” who forgot that it was they who were the insurgency, and not the industrial North.
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Lee fought with the army he had, not with the army he needed, and it took too long, because of the successes, to change. After Sherman it was all over, but the fat-lady hadn’t sung (Grant).
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And let’s see, where did Grant come from?
December 26th, 2013 at 12:07 am
Thanks Nat-
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A bit honesty, I thank you for that.
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Lost whatever that was. Now time to go forward.
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Talk to the kids. Quickly you see there is no base. Nothing to build on. Where to from here . . . ? I think, probably as you do that honesty has to be the first step . . . but then, what follows, exactly?
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Amazing how poorly we are situated to deal with this particular contingency, that which is bearing down on us at present. Not just one of the big problems, but probably the only problem, in terms of political community, how we hold together . . . the latest outrage the FRB quicky . . .
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It’s Christmas, and I am with my family, but the question nags, what if nobody really gives a . . .
December 26th, 2013 at 12:55 am
a bit too much vinho . . . sorry Nate . . . Merry Christmas . . .
December 26th, 2013 at 2:01 am
Nate,
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A friendly word of advice — Seydlitz89 has spoken in other threads about problems with strategic intelligence informing strategic thought. I would not make sweeping judgements about the incentives driving my writing beyond the fact that in academia, you question authority and tradition. Whether or not that leads to publication and tenure is variable — but everyone does it. I’ll also note that if I was dead-set on getting tenure or publications, I would not waste thousands of words on blogs that count for exactly *zero* in those categories.
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I write here and other places for the same reasons I started a long time ago: I care about ideas, and I’m willing to spew forth about them and see what happens. Sometimes it can result in products that are publishable, sometimes it can result in practical tools, and sometimes it results in nothing at all. I don’t really care either way–that people read them, take them seriously, and respond to them is what matters.
December 26th, 2013 at 2:21 am
Finally, on the general issue of intellectuals and practitioners — all of these are just a bunch of hoary cliches. Hopefully in 2013 we can retire the tired scripts of the man in the arena, the objective scientist, the policy-relevant scholar, and others. Lynn is very right that they can so easily dissolve into self-serving buzzwords.
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All I can really say is that I take the world of application very seriously — and the vast majority of my writing since I began has had to do with applied matters. But the applied isn’t everything. Sometimes you have to go down intellectual rabbit holes to try to get at something more foundational and abstract — without thought of whether it will lead you or whether or not it will be worth it. I’ve always been willing to take that risk, because I love the journey even if it takes me back where I start. You’re welcome to come along for the ride or not. If so, great. If not, then that’s also fair.
December 26th, 2013 at 1:43 pm
I do think there is a strong affinity between intelligence collection/analysis and strategic thinking/theory, as Adam mentions. Much as the US intelligence process was corrupted due to political interest/pressure during the run up to the Iraq war. When the resulting strategic disaster could no longer be ignored, various intelligence chiefs dutifully fell on their swords under the rubric of “intelligence failure” to take some of the heat off the politicos. In all a sorry spectacle indeed, but that was only part of it. Torture, the stalking horse of the police state, came into vogue at this time as well. Name one US Humint ops specialist who thought that was a good idea, but I can save you the bother. There were none.
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So just as intelligence has been corrupted, so has strategic thought with many of the same influential people who led us down “the cakewalk” to Iraq still standing and pontificating at their various podiums as Nate’s examples illustrate.
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I would say in a positive note that there has been a promising development in this area regarding US intelligence and their seeming collective opposition to intervention in the Syrian war. We can only hope that this repeats itself should the current machinations in the US Senate regarding a war with Iran become more serious.
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We could obviously use the same thing in academic circles regarding strategic studies, which would require an open and honest look at US strategic behavior since 9/11 and its results, that is dealing openly with the influence of US political relations . . .
December 26th, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Zen-
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Much agreed that the military needs to do better with writing and reflecting on success and failure.
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We don’t do ourselves any favors when we short-circuit the learning process after having “won”–especially when we didn’t win. There’s a lot of bad lessons which we will carry with us because we decided we didn’t want to learn from them–because doing so would tarnish whatever victory was gained.
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Lynn-
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I’m not sure if that was directed at me, but if so, please bear in mind that my quarrel is not with civilian control of the military. However-civilian control must be exercised by the right civilians. The random, credentialed members of the military-academic complex will not do.
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I do believe the presidency has become too imperial over the years, but that the necessary correction must come from Congress. Getting effective and productive congressional oversight is a gargantuan problem in itself, though.
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Nor am I arguing that the military is a paragon of accountability. What I DO know is that in an institution where there are many in leadership positions who don’t suffer fools, there is a kind of accountability that exists little elsewhere. I say without pride that I have ended the careers of officers and staff NCOs who didn’t cut the mustard. It’s usually not a positive experience for either party–but it needs to and does happen. Is there cronyism in the military? Yes–in fact, I think it’s probably more present in the Marines (the service which I’m commissioned in) than elsewhere. And I bristle under that, as do many others. I also think it unethical for so many former officers to work as defense contractors. That should be curtailed, too.
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Adam-
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The following paragraph is what really hit a nerve for me:
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“I’m under no illusions that it will lead to better strategic *practice*, but as a PhD student it’s my job to question what has come before, add to it, and produce knowledge irrespective of practical application. Though I suspect that some of it could be of value to people like Nate once it has been formalized and broken down into more practical language and structure. ”
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It hit a nerve because of the presumption with which you “suspect” that I could find value in your writings, once their “formalized and broken down into more practical language and structure.” It’s written as if book-lernin were the sole province of credentialed intellectuals, with a dash of Ezra Klein policy wonk “thought leader”-ship.
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I’m not opposed to going down rabbit holes, and doing what you call “foundational” work. It’s crucial and necessary, but it must also be rigorous. It’s that foundational work which is the role of doctrine or concept–things I have no quarrel with. As to the requirement that even foundational thought must be rigorous: Recall that I’m of the generation where Tom Barnett literally wanted to send Marines on patrol to “reduce entropy” in gap states. Seriously. That has about as much intellectual rigor as the infamous slides which were foundational to the OIF I Phase IV Operations and to the OEF COIN construct, respectively:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ppt1s.jpg
http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/091203-engel-big-9a.jpg
When I say that rigor wasn’t present–I don’t mean to say that it took a great deal of time, resources, and intellect to produce some of the work I just cited. I only say that, even in the conceptual stage of development, words must mean things. And language must be used with clarity and brevity. Rigor must be added continuously through the process. If an idea is half-baked to begin with, it’s not going to be fully-baked by the end.
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This reminds me of an aphorism that Mattis famous for saying–in the 1990s when there was much claptrap about influencing the mind of the enemy, shaping him, etc., Mattis, who was then commander of 7th Marine Regiment (REIN), famously said the best way to influence the mind of the enemy is to put a bullet in it. Grandiose, yes. Rigorous? Absolutely.
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To that end, I question the whole debate over meta heuristics, algorithms, etc. We don’t assault enemy positions because of a meta heuristic or an algorithm–and yet, ultimately, that’s the direction of your thought. In any case, I would urge a shift in the nature of the dialog, because the vocabulary you’re using doesn’t capture the nature of what’s going on–it’s intellectual and antiseptic. And that is why I say that living in a world where your decisions actually have an impact does great things to sharpen your thoughts. I don’t say it because of the “Man in the Arena” cliche (although you malign TR needlessly), etc. I say it because if you pretend to speak of the reality that military professionals inhabit, you should at least deign to 1) write with clarity and brevity, 2) not speak down to officers, and 3) recognize the nature of the world they inhabit.
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You’ll find more success relating to officers when you do.
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The military is sordid enough–but adding credentialed intellectuals to it only make it more so, and the tragedy of the human military experience all the deeper. Because of that, it takes a great deal of effort for military men to take the pills that “doctors” of military history/conflict/etc. prescribe, due in large part to the perverse incentives that are in play, and the measure of personal risk (and sometimes career risk) that officers often have to put on the line to get where they are. That’s a gap that you’re going to have to figure out how to bridge. If you’re somehow different than the other defense intellectuals, then you’re a rare bird indeed.
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That’s all. I say all of this with no malice, and as a guy who’s been following your written work for many years now (since at least 2007 or so). I appreciate some of the ideas you bring, and I’ll take them a la carte, but be very careful about the demeanor that may be inferred from the words you write. You’re dealing with some strong personalities, and, at best, you might be ignored. At worst, you’ll be fileted.
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Semper Fidelis, Adam
December 26th, 2013 at 7:51 pm
Nate,
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I appreciate the warning. However, I think you’ll find that we actually are in violent agreement on most things on this thread.
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First, I do not think book learning is the exclusive preserve of the Ezra Klein type. I also care very much about clarity and rigor in ideas that could put men’s lives at stake. I agree 100% with Mattis, and I am also sorry for the damage that pseudoscientific notions of “entropy,” “gaps,” and other ideas inflicted. This is actually the impetus for my comment about practical language and structure — for an idea to be used by anyone, it must be made as rigorous and unambiguous as possible.
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However, no ideas sprout out of someone’s head completely fully formed. When I create any kind of concept, they exist first in outline form, are clunky, and aren’t’ as clear or as rigorous as I want them to be. The process of putting them on paper to begin with, even in skeleton form, is necessary for them to *become* useful to someone in some shape or form eventually. I don’t know in advance whether or not they will be — I “roll the iron dice” (conceptually) every time, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
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Though I would not any way want to suggest I have even a fraction of CvC’s brilliance, you were right to compare the opaqueness to his book. He was writing in outline form and didn’t intend for it to be published until it was fully ready. But it was published, and we are all the better for it. I share my outlines precisely because I think they are better off getting input from you and others than they would be just sitting around in draft format. This is where I think we are in agreement, but simply are quibbling over procedural steps. I roll the dice, see what happens, and am happy for it.
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Regarding the nature of the language and septic/anti-septicness — there are layers of abstraction in any kind of knowledge about a concept. Sometimes they at best relate only indirectly to each other, other times there is a clear link. Many concepts sit at a very high layer of abstraction, but can still usefully describe something of interest that eventually trickles down to others. Is this idea one of those? I don’t know yet, but I’m at least trying to see. While it may not fit with the reality you are familiar with, it may not need to be.
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Sometimes you won’t find insights about assaulting objectives or applications to life or death decisions from concepts — which is fine. Everything has a place and a utility. The trick is knowing where it is. And it’s hard to find it out without taking chances (conceptually, not in application) and seeing what happens. Very little about, say, the security dilemma or rationalist ideas about war fits with the perspective of war from the ground up. But it does explain how war can happen even when neither side desires it. That’s valuable, but I wouldn’t ever try to apply out of its context.
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Description is also not prescription. One of my chief critiques of academics and intellectuals is that they come up with a useful description of something and then arrogate themselves the power to try to use that as a blunt weapon to change the world — no matter the actual friction, uncertainties, and problems involved in translating concept to application. I am determined not to do this myself, and the problem of intellectuals as social engineers is actually something I have written a great deal about lately.
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I appreciate your comments about bridging the gap, but I think it also goes the other way. I am sorry my comment hit a nerve, and will try to be more careful. However, I also feel some of your own comments implied things about my own motivates that also hit a nerve as well — particularly bits about tenure and publication (studying strategy is a very poor way to advance in the academy, and blogging is even more dubious) and being mentioned in the same breadth as those that try to make Marines assault objectives to “reduce entropy.” I think you will find many people share your concerns, but also do not enjoy being judged in such a fashion.
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How to bridge the gap in defense intellectualism is a worthy topic. In my own opinion (which I discussed at length a couple weeks ago), it is best done (by the defense analyst) by solving concrete problems that arise from the world of application. It is also about being humble about knowledge gaps and different bases of expertise That was what the people who analyzed specific problems in WWII and the Cold War did, and we are all the better for it. I don’t see any of my writing in the vein of this post as contributing to gap-bridging in any ways — just outlining ideas for idea’s sake, and seeing what happens.
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What I mean at the end of the day as my “job” is that you pursue a PhD because you want to think about something different and new. And it’s impossible to do so without questioning old ideas, simply for the sake of it. I’m sure that isn’t restricted to PhD students — it’s Boyd’s Destruction and Creation. Anyone can do it. But how they do it isn’t uniform.
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I am happy you appreciate some of my writings, and at the end of the day that’s all that really motivates me. That someone smart out there does, and keeps reading. 🙂
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-A