Quantum COIN
With quantum mechanics being used as a metaphor.
The New Physics: Key to Strengthening COIN by A. Lawrence Chickering
….At the present time, most of what is being done for COIN is driven by old physics concepts, while many things we ought to be doing are understandable more in terms of the new physics.
One can see the difference between these two concepts in terms of the distinction between helping and empowering.3 The importance of this distinction is implicit in the widely quoted statement that T.E. Lawrence made in 1917 about the importance of empowering people and giving them ownership by letting them do things. -Do not try to do too much with your own hands,? Lawrence wrote.4 -Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. . . .?5 Helping is a powerful example of simple, Newtonian causation; it produces -concrete, measurable results,? which are the central concern of most philanthropy and donor programs. Unfortunately, the concrete results it produces are far weaker than the outcomes that result from empowerment and ownership.
Helping? is Newtonian and objective. You build a well, and the -measurable result? is a well. -Empowering? and -ownership? are post-Newtonian and subjective. You cannot -see? empowerment or ownership. These concepts have power when they are felt by people. Following Lawrence‘s statement, empowering and ownership are the key in COIN.
Empowering people, encouraging them to do things for themselves, shows the importance of non-local causation and results based only on probabilities. When a local community becomes empowered, there is no certainty what it will do. They will do things people care about-things they value. If you work in 100 communities, you cannot say what each village will do, but you can predict that some percentage will build wells, and some other percentage will build schools-and so on.
You know that empowering will not produce the -concrete, measurable results? you can get if the -helper? does the work, but when the helper does the work, there will be no community ownership and no sense of responsibility for security or maintenance of the -improvement?. With empowerment and ownership, people will protect a well or school and will maintain it. That explains why the well built by -an Arab? (Lawrence‘s phrase) is worth so much more than one built by -us? (the helpers).
The author has a solid point about top-down, outsider-controlled, hierarchically-organized aid activities cultivating an attitude of dependency, passivity or fatalism in populations that COIN forces are attempting to win over.
If we see symptoms of “welfare dependency” and disengagement from civil society in American neighborhoods with minimal levels of employment, high levels of violent crime and atomized social structures, as partly the product of intervention by social workers, police, state court systems and Federal programs, how much more so is this the case with third-country COIN? With bad people running around with RPG’s and AK-47’s? What would you, the impoverished and unarmed farmer of the village do? Stick out your neck? Or keep your head down?
January 18th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Zen,Hmm. I was less impressed. Which of the author’s points really depended on the quantum metaphor? To my mind, it was mostly hand-waving, throwing around phrases like "quantum logic." I have enjoyed your links on metaphor and cognition, but I think that they depend on both parts of the metaphor being understood individually. I only have a BS in Physics, and it has been a dozen or so years (and the Marine Corps hasn’t asked for a lot in terms of time dependent Schrodinger wave equations)…All that said, I’d guess it is unlikely that the author understands quantum mechanics; it appears that he mostly uses it as a synonym for counterintuitive.
January 18th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
"…All that said, I’d guess it is unlikely that the author understands quantum mechanics; it appears that he mostly uses it as a synonym for counterintuitive"
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Yes, he was thinking in terms of paradigms; mechanistic/Newtonian thinking in a social context tends to be linear.
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Oddly enough, my amigo Shane Deichman, who is a physicist at and a former science advisor to the USMC at JFCOM, wrote in yesterday to discuss the counterintuitive aspect of quantum mechanics. Later I will see if he will permit me to reproduce his observations about this article here ( or, Shane, if you are reading this, fire away).
January 18th, 2011 at 5:33 pm
I’d be interested to hear Dr. Deichman’s thoughts. Since getting my BS, I’ve mostly done the usual reading in math-sci popularizations (I just finished a pretty good one–Manjit Kumar’s "Quantum" about the competing views of QM held by Bohr and Einstein). I have tried to fight my way through the Sakurai graduate QM textbook, without much success, so I’m loath to disagree with someone who did. There’s my disclaimer. I may be about to write something dumb. Anyway, if Mr. Chickering wants to say paradoxical, he should go ahead and say it. The 3-24 lists counterinsurgency paradoxes, but it doesn’t sex it up by saying that these paradoxes are caused by quantum logic. To put it another way, let’s say that someone wins a Nobel Prize for clearing up a lot of this Foundations of QM stuff (non-local hidden variables or something); COIN would still have these paradoxes. All Mr. Chickering has done is gone around inventing words like the head writer of a bad sci-fi series (flux capacitor, Heisenberg compensator…) Hmm, I’ve come off a bit grumpy here, which will probably serve me poorly if the doctor comes along to beat me down. So, I like a lot Mr. Chickering’s argument. I just feel that his use of the Quantum Mechanics metaphor adds little to the argument, and could even detract from a reader’s comprehension.
January 18th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
If you strip away inaccurate physics metaphors, there’d be little left of strategic theory. It’s through analogies like "friction", "center of gravity", "kinetics", and the like that mankind reduces the world to a size his puny brain can efficiently process. Mathematical representations of physics are a more rigorous form of analogy but they are a species of analogy that most find baroque. 98% the 5% of quantum mechanics I understand comes from bad analogies to more macro-level things. What is it that Schrodinger had against macro-kittens anyway? This inner anti-kitten sadism almost reduces him to the moral level of a Dutch strategic theorist.
January 18th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
Strip away the physics-speak, or at least reduce it to a manageable metaphor, and this (unquoted above in the blog post) seems the most salient point. We could may borrow from a different science, say, grammar school chemistry, and say that the difference is between mixtures and compounds. Hmmm. Perhaps mathematics would help us out, if we compare addition/subtraction to multiplication/division; and, if we use the ways this author has used Newtonian vs Quantum physics.
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In any case, one is moving chess pieces on the board, the other is creating a video game — or better yet, an MMORPG.
January 18th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
Strip away the physics-speak, or at least reduce it to a manageable metaphor, and this (unquoted above in the blog post) seems the most salient point. We could may borrow from a different science, say, grammar school chemistry, and say that the difference is between mixtures and compounds. Hmmm. Perhaps mathematics would help us out, if we compare addition/subtraction to multiplication/division; and, if we use the ways this author has used Newtonian vs Quantum physics.
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In any case, one is moving chess pieces on the board, the other is creating a video game — or better yet, an MMORPG.
January 18th, 2011 at 11:31 pm
Sorry for the double post. I kept getting some kind of a very long server/site error when I hit submit, didn’t know the darned thing had actually submitted.
January 19th, 2011 at 7:23 am
[…] though he drew on the Newtonian models handed down to him by the Enlightenment, used those model in such a way that he evoked the nascent […]
October 21st, 2013 at 8:49 am
Nicely put. Regards.|