zenpundit.com

[approached by Lynn C. Rees]

Scott’s comment gets me thinking:

Truly two main paths present: passive (deter and encourage) and active (conquer, convert, capture, or contain) [via Jeremy and Hans Delbruck]…

The strategist needs cognitive elasticity (Boyd would call “adaptability” and Eccles/Rosinski would call “strategic flexibility”), as the world/circumstances are ever-changing.

By reflex, modernity sees mind as a tug of war. To software extremists, mind is fluid, its course shifted constantly by the unfolding environment. To hardware extremists, mind is solid, its granite face reinforced by inheritance at a glacial pace. Risking fallacy, it seems reality is found somewhere in the mud puddle between tugs: firmware. Confounding software extremists, mind is not fluid. It’s not even rubbery: much of mind is solidified by inheritance. Confounding hardware extremists, mind is not solid. It’s not even doomed by age to irrevocable rigidity: mind can be bent, given time and constancy. Mind is plastic: it knows when to hold ’em and knows when to fold’em.

A connected view argues that mind’s right conjures ad hoc responses to new things while its left turns the ad hoc into routine responses. Predictably, this means that, as mind ages, its center of gravity leans left. To the infant, everything is new, to the elder, many things are eerily familiar. Focus follows time.

Swun Dz thought describes strategy as shr shifted between jeng and chi. Ralph Sawyer translates shr as “strategic configuration of power”, jeng as “orthodox”, and chi as “unorthodox”. The shr path of PMI thought agrees:

What is a project?

In A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Third Edition, the Project Management Institute defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. As simple as this definition may seem, there are a few key points that define a project as distinct from ongoing operations. Again, from the PMBOK® Guide:

Operations and projects differ primarily in that operations are ongoing and repetitive while projects are temporary and unique. A project can thus be defined in terms of its distinctive characteristics. Temporary means that every project has a definite beginning and a definite end. Unique means that the product or service is different in some distinguishing way from all similar products or services.

Poor Swun Dz. Born too early for his PMP®.

Fear not. The news is good. While the far future can look forward with gladness to finding bamboo fragments of the fabled PMBOK® Guide – Fourth Edition clutched tightly in skeletal fists when the tombs of the heroic project managers of old are opened, we get a few blessed scraps of future ancient PMI wisdom for today:

• jeng == hardware ==  routine == left brain
• chi == software == project == right brain

America swoons for Swun Dz  and the Swun Dz America swoons for is chi to the bone. For today’s America, jeng is a great sin while chi is a great virtue. The root fear of the age is being overtaken by the dread trope of the age: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.” In a jungle subject to the law of the instrument, the last thing you want to be accused of is jeng gray in nail and hammer. The sneer of “same old, same old” will not kill you, but it may serve as your hipness epitaph.

Now, as with all tropes too far, chi has fought the good fight for so long that it’s become what it professes to abominate: a hammer gone abroad in search of routines to pound. America is mired in routine appeals to chi. Yet Master Swun taught differently:

What enable[s] an army to withstand the enemy’s attack and not be defeated are uncommon [chi] and common [jeng] maneuvers.

The army will be like throwing a stone against an egg;

it is a matter of weakness and strength.

Generally, in battle, use the common [jeng] to engage the enemy and the uncommon [chi] to gain victory.

Those skilled at uncommon [chi] maneuvers are as endless as the heavens and earth, and as inexhaustible as the rivers and seas.

Like the sun and the moon, they set and rise again.

Like the four seasons, they pass and return again.

There are no more than five musical notes, yet the variations in the five notes cannot all be heard.

There are no more than five basic colors, yet the variations in the five colors cannot all be seen.

There are no more than five basic flavors, yet the variations in the five flavors cannot all be tasted.

In battle, there are no more than two types of attacks:

Uncommon [chi] and common [jeng], yet the variations of the uncommon [chi] and common [jeng] cannot all be comprehended.

The uncommon [chi] and the common [jeng] produce each other, like an endless circle.

Who can comprehend them?

I’d amend a few items in Scott’s excellent formulation. By my reckoning, strength is one unbroken spectrum. The more active and more passive, which it is not unreasonable to identify with chi and jeng, are not two distinct paths. They are two spectrum bookends. All flavors of strength, spoken, physical, wealth, and so forth, fall some place between them. Chi and jeng are swallowed up in the spectrum of strength, reduced to reference points scattered across its face.

Intensity of strength varies, and is measured, by shr, its strategic configuration of strength. And what aspects of strength are configurable?

• reach: certainty of means
• drive: certainty of motive
• grip: certainty of opportunity

From where chi sits, this configurability looks like:

• reach: flexibility of means
• drive: flexibility of motive
• grip: flexibility of opportunity

From where jeng sits, configurability looks more like:

• reach: solidity of means
• drive: solidity of motive
• grip: solidity of opportunity

A more balanced approach looks like:

• reach: plasticity of means
• drive: plasticity of motive
• grip: plasticity of opportunity

These three will vary in their plasticity. Reach will be fluid and then rigid. Drive will be rigid now and later more fluid. Grip will be more solid before and more flexible after.

Politics is the division (and dividing) of strength. Strategy is its continuation and instrument. Strategy is the configuration (and configuring) of strength, the balance (and balancing), the plasticity (and plasticizing) of strength’s reach, drive, and grip. It will solidify and liquidate its strategic configuration of strength as the wider political configuration of the division of power is anticipated and reacted to by those balanced within.

Three variations, drive, reach, and grip, yet the variations of the three cannot all be comprehended.

They produce each other, like an endless plastic circle.

Who can comprehend them?

[ by Charles Cameron — farewell to a great actor, also some curious related videos ]
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So Peter O’Toole is no longer among us. Film-makers and actors routinely bring three dimensions out of the two-dimensional silver screen, but O’Toole had the gift to show us more dimensions than most, so I thought a small tribute might be in place.

As a Brit with an interest in the local strain of theology, O’Toole’s role as King Henry II in Peter Glenville‘s film adaptation of Jean Anouilh‘s Becket was an obvious choice…

But then, you know, there’s also TE Lawrence, who ties into the fascination hereabouts with strategy, and with the Middle East, and my being a Brit again — so I went looking for a decent clip from David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, and found…

I mean, why?

Lawrence of Arabia didn’t look at all like that, we all know what he looked like, he looked like this:

**

I’ve been posting about these exceedingly curious YouTube videos meshing bin Laden imagery with great classical music for a while now [see here and here], and wondering what on earth they might mean. I ran across some more of them recently — if the topic is still of interest, let me know, and I’ll post something on my more recent finds.

[ by Charles Cameron — introducing a significant post by Tim Furnish re Israel’s safety, Iran and more ]
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The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Picturesque Palestine, 1881, left) and the Israeli Iron Dome missile defence system (contemporary, right)

Our occasional guest-blogger and friend Dr Timothy Furnish has a new post up at his MahdiWatch blog that I’d like to bring to your attention.

Here’s his closing paragraph, containing (a) an observation comparing the “end times” significance of Syria and Jerusalem vs Mecca and Medina, (b) a corresponding hint to security analysts, and (c) the implication that Iranian nukes would likely not be used against Jerusalem, since the Noble Sanctuary / Temple Mount with its two great mosques is altogether too important in Islamic eschatological terms to be put at risk…

Muslim eschatological fervor is boiling over in nearby Syria, as I analyzed on this site in September, 2013. The extent to which Muslims in Israel are aware of, and inflamed by, this is unknown; what is known is that Damascus and Jersualem are much more prominent in Islamic traditions (both Sunni and Shi`i) about the coming of the Mahdi and the subsequent eschatological events than are Mecca and Medina. Therefore, it would behoove Western geopolitical and intelligence analysts—both in and out of government—to put some effort into studying this topic, rather than relegating it to the theater of the absurd or myopically obsessing over what Evangelical Christians think about the end of the world. I would also add that the historical eschatological significance of Jersualem to Muslims is a major argument against the thesis that the Iranian regime wants nuclear weapons in order to destroy Israel (I have already argued at length elsewhere that this charge little accords with Twelver Shi`i doctrines): Islam’s third-holiest site is that religion’s most important eschatological locale, and no one is more respectful of such traditions than the ayatollahs in Qom and Tehran. Thus, if al-Quds is nuked or even contaminated with fall-out from a bomb on Tel Aviv, the Mahdi and Allah will not only be displeased but unable to stage the eschatological denouement. The presence of the Domes of the Rock and Chain in Jerusalem is thus, in my studied opinion, an even greater deterrent to Islamic nuclear attack on that city than is Israel’s more prosaic Iron Dome anti-missile system.

To read the whole thing, go to Domes of the Rock and Chain v. A Dome of Iron: Which Best Protects Israel from Islamic Attack?

Clever title, that — and a must-read post.

**

As a mild reinforcement to Tim Furnish’s point, I’m going to drop in here a part of an earlier ZP post of mine, including two quotes on the close kinship between the Kaaba in Mecca and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, as constituting in some sense the book-ends both of world history and of the history of Islam considered as the final revelation.

**

As I’ve noted before, al-Aqsa isn’t just the focal point of the Palestinian / Israeli question, nor it is only the place at which the Prophet alighted from his steed, Buraq, and ascended to receive the divine instructions for prayer in the Miraj — it is also the destination of the Mahdi‘s victorious army in the Khorasan strand of ahadith.

Indeed, it has been suggested that the Pierced Rock of the Dome of the Rock in al-Aqsa is closely related to the Black Stone of the Kaaba. Kanan Makiya, in his part-fictional part-documentary book, The Rock, quotes Charles Matthews‘ translation of Burhan al-Din ibn Firka al-Fazari‘s Kitab Ba’ith al-Nufus ila Ziyarat al-Quds al-Mahrus (The Book of Arousing Souls to Visit Jerusalem’s Holy Walls) from Matthews’ Palestine: Mohammedan Holy Land:

Verily, the Kaaba is in an equivalent position to the Frequented House in the Seventh Heaven, to which the angels of Allah make pilgrimage. And if rocks fell from it, they would have fallen on the place of the Rock of the Temple of Mecca [i.e. the Black Stone]. And indeed, Paradise is in the Seventh Heaven in an equivalent position to the Holy Temple (in Jerusalem) and the Rock; and if a rock had fallen from it, it would have fallen upon the place of the Rock there. And for this case the city is called Urushalim, and Paradise is called Dar al-Salam, the House of Peace.

Indeed, David Roxburgh mentions all these matters, writing in Salma Khadra Jayyusi et al., The city in the Islamic world, vol. 1. p 756:

This movement corresponded to other efforts — before, during, and after the Crusades — to establish “geo-theological” connections between Jerusalem and Mecca, whose preeminent sanctity was inviolable up until the end of days. Examples linking Mecca to Jerusalem include the Prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal journey from Mecca to Jerusalem (isra) and his ascension from Jerusalem to the throne of God (miraj); the underground joining of the waters of Zamzam to Silwan (var. Siloam) during the “feast of the sacrifice” (id al-adha); and the transfer of the Kaba and its black stone from Mecca to Jerusalem during the last days. these various traditions linked Jerusalem to Mecca, sometimes by sets of doubled features, in a near symmetry and in a calendar that will culminate during the end of days.

So there’s an eschatological dimension to all these parallelisms, too…

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

As the holiday season is here, I thought it would be amusing between now and Christmas to do a series of posts on books by people who have, in some fashion, been friends of ZP by supporting us with links, guest-posts, friendly comments and other intuitive gestures of online association. One keyboard washes the other.

Gian Gentile 

Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency 

How Effective is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo 

Colonel Gentile is a historian, a professor at West Point, a combat veteran of Iraq and is the foremost public critic of pop-centric COIN theory around, bar none, which he has translated into a book-length critique that is required reading for the con side of the COIN debate. Gian has also been kind enough to grace the comment section here from time to time as well as participating in the Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable at ChicagoBoyz blog.

Don Vandergriff

Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions 

Spirit, Blood and Treasure: The American Cost of Battle in the 21st Century 

The Path to Victory

Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War 

I have had the pleasure of hearing Don speak and demonstrate some of his adaptive leadership techniques at the Boyd Conferences which I greatly enjoyed and strongly endorse, for those interested in having Vandergriff as a speaker or consultant. His absence this year at Boyd was much regretted but Don was off doing some important work this year overseas. Catch him in print instead.

John Robb 

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization 

I am an unabashed huge fan of John’s work and Global Guerrillas has been on my (very) short list of must read sites for years. This book, like Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s Netwars, is a classic of emerging trends in warfare and strategy that belongs on your shelf.

(by Adam Elkus)

How to think about the shape of future, high-end conventional conflict? Military robotics seems to be a point of recent focus. Take Tom Ricks’ latest on the American military:

By and large, the United States still has an Industrial Age military in an Information Age world. With some exceptions, the focus is more on producing mass strength than achieving precision. Land forces, in particular, need to think less about relying on big bases and more about being able to survive in an era of persistent global surveillance. For example, what will happen when the technological advances of the past decade, such as armed drones controlled from the far side of the planet, are turned against us? A drone is little more than a flying improvised explosive device. What if terrorists find ways to send them to Washington addresses they obtain from the Internet?

Imagine a world where, in a few decades, Google (having acquired Palantir) is the world’s largest defense contractor. Would we want generals who think more like George Patton or Steve Jobs — or who offer a bit of both? How do we get them? These are the sorts of questions the Pentagon should begin addressing. If it does not, we should find leaders — civilian and in uniform — who will.

I quote (as I often do) from John Robb’s excellent analysis of drone swarms because Robb has produced one of the few classics in the emerging military literature on the future of drone warfare. Here, Robb rhapsodizes about the future drone swarm commander and his unlikely origins in the civilian (and South Korea-dominated) Starcraft game series:

Here are some of the characteristics we’ll see in the near future:

• Swarms.  The cost and size of drones will shrink.  Nearly everyone will have access to drone tech (autopilots already cost less than $30).  Further, the software to enable drones to employ swarm behavior will improve.  So, don’t think in terms of a single drone. Think in terms of a single person controlling hundreds and thousands.
• Intelligence.  Drones will be smarter than they are today.  The average commercial chip passed the level of insect intelligence a little less than a decade ago (which “magically” resulted in an explosion of drone/bot tech).  Chips will cross rat intelligence in 2018 or so.  Think in terms of each drone being smart enough to follow tactical instructions.
• Dynamism.  The combination of massive swarms with individual elements being highly intelligent puts combat on an entirely new level.  It requires a warrior that can provide tactical guidance and situational awareness in real time at a level that is beyond current training paradigms.

Training Drone Bonjwas

Based on the above requirements, the best training for drones (in the air and on land) isn’t real world training, it’s tactical games (not first person shooters).  Think in terms of the classic military scifi book, “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. Of the games currently on the market, the best example of the type of expertise required is Blizzard’s StarCraft, a scifi tactical management game that has amazing multiplayer tactical balance/dynamism.  The game is extremely popular worldwide, but in South Korea, it has reached cult status.  The best players, called Bonjwas, are treated like rock stars, and for good reason:

• Training of hand/eye/mind.  Speeds of up to 400 keyboard mouse (macro/micro) tactical commands per minute have been attained.  Think about that for a second.  That’s nearly 7 commands a second.
• Fight multi-player combat simulations  for 10-12 hours a day.  They live the game for a decade and then burn out.   Mind vs. mind competition continuously.
• To become a bonjwa, you have to defeat millions of opponents to reach the tournament rank, and then dominate the tournament rank for many years.  The ranking system/ladder that farms new talent is global (Korea, China, SEA, North America, and Europe), huge (millions of players), and continuous (24x7x365).

That’s the tactics—but what about the strategy? Robb calls it a “tactical management game,” which is correct. We can discern a bare shell of the “strategy” we normally discuss in the higher level decisions concerning the composition and deployment of the force. And here we also see a different kind of strategic control at play, one much more having to do with the Cold War science of operations research.

One important cognitive aspect of Starcraft that has been automated is the evolution up the tech tree. The tech tree that the player must advance up in order to produce needed units, accessories, and tactics is deterministic, perhaps reflecting the real-world convergence toward a “modern” style of high-end conventional tactics. Starcraft as a game represents the purely tactical considerations of warfare as an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors, in keeping with Clausewitz’s statement that tactics can be considered closer to science than other aspects of warfare.

It is a reflection of Starcraft‘s deterministic structure that the tech tree “build orders”, the most crucial element of Starcraft‘s mode of war, can be automated. A genetic algorithm infamously was derived to optimize build orders. But this is only possible because the build orders themselves optimize a very small piece of the overall problem, and one made possible by determinism baked into the game.

The use of genetic algorithms to produce build orders also interestingly enough mirrors the overall social, economic, and organizational structure that produces a champion Starcraft player. In the 1980s, Robert Axelrod created an algorithm tournament designed to find a best-performing strategy to the canonical “Prisoner’s Dilemma” in game theory. Using the tournament selection mode of genetic algorithms, Axelrod iteratively weeded out “unfit” strategies until a dominant strategy was found. Perhaps the process that Robb describes is quite literally “tournament selection” that produces an optimal Starcraft player type.

The most important element of strategy — translating organized violence into political payoff — is mostly absent. Starcraft demands the intricate steps needed to prepare the weapon itself (build older optimization) and immaculate skill at firing it (in-game command) but not the problem of ensuring that the violence make political sense. There is no security dilemma caused by the threat of Zergling rushes. 🙂

Because it is a videogame, Starcraft as experienced by the player is nothing close to the overall difficulty, uncertainty, and complexity implied by the overall in-game universe of factions, technologies, and personalities. The level of cognitive difficulty that must be dealt with is kept on the order of something that a single player can reason through. Of course, in even in the “closed” world of real Cold War military science (which Starcraft has eerie similarities to), this has been the stuff of military staffs, RAND and Hudson-like research groups, systems analysts, and supercomputers.

What about uncertainty and complexity? Depending on the game, the most important political-military decisions may not be up to the player. The transformative in-game decision to rebel against Arcturus Mengsk and create Raynor’s Raiders is not made by the player but by the grieving Jim Raynor.  In Starcraft: Brood War and Starcraft II, player choice becomes important in structuring the flow of action. When attacking Char in Starcraft II, the player must choose to either attack the enemy’s air support or ground elements. Both choices are presented are potentially valid depending on player preference. Many other individual choices lead to important distinctions in the shape of events. But the overall “basins of attractions” built into the game structure pull the player towards the same broad outcome regardless. That’s because the game universe and the creators’ demands is the overarching political-military context that determines the path of the war.

When it comes to multiplayer matches, online games in general make combat sport. That is why we dub the Korean Starcraft aces champions. They compete in a ritualized game with clear rules and all-powerful human gamemasters that create the game itself and instantiate their ideas of what an ideal combat sport represents in computer  code. Starcraft has much more in common with the Roman coliseum battles than the Roman army on campaign in some harsh European or Middle Eastern land. Of course, all online environments have weak points that are often exploited to offer advantage, but Starcraft‘s limited range of behavior makes it easier for game-masters to secure than the sprawling World of Warcraft or EVE Online. 

Though I have some serious misgivings about the ethical context of Ender’s Game as a novel, it also remarkably approximates the experience of game-playing in many real-time “strategy” games like Starcraft. Ender himself, whom Robb analogizes, is a virtual virtuoso that spends most of his time in Ender’s Game unaware that the “training” simulations he is playing are actually the war he is training to fight in the first place. Hence one comes to wonder if the real genius is not necessarily entirely Ender, who supplies the cognitive firepower necessary to dominate Clausewitz’s “play of chance” on the battlefield. Rather, what about the men and women who organized  and equipped the fleet?  And of the politicians and generals that decided  the overall shape of the strategy that Ender executes, and infamously decided to authorize the genocide of the “Bug” aliens Ender exterminates with weapons of mass destruction?

This isn’t a strike against Robb’s idea that Starcraft is a metaphor for one part of future warfare. Robb himself states that Starcraft is tactical management, and it is as good an vision to contend with as any other. Changes in warfare that begin on the level of tactics have strategic implications. We already know that tactical virtuosity that might be so essential to victory in a closed environment with well-formulated rules are often counterbalanced by the problem of making those skills serve strategic effectiveness outside that environment. What kind of problems might arise for the hypothetical Starcraft-ish military bot commander?

The first problem to be surmounted is collective action. Multi-agent systems face similar coordination problems as seen in human relationships. The interdisciplinary field of algorithmic game theory has arisen to study how to create algorithmic mechanism design for solving many of these issues. Another problem lies in the conflict between speed of tactical execution and the slower-moving demands of strategy. The Cold War stories of commanders that decide to risk annihilation rather than launch nuclear forces on faulty signals tells that many strategic problems have to do not necessarily with the most efficient ways of employing violence but rather have to do with the control of military power. This question has in fact dominated most discussion about autonomous weapons.

Lastly, the most important insight that Robb’s piece gives us is that Starcraft is an social environment that produces novel behavior. It is the online wargaming medium itself and its speed and essentially social complexity that produces the Starcraft champion’s unique characteristics. Similarly, a certain Corsican arose from the cauldron of the “multi-player interaction” of an era caught between the emerging crest of “modern” warfare and the 18th century military system. Dubbed the “God of War,” he became the template for every 19th century commander to copy. The most important strategic problem implied by Robb’s blog is conceptualizing the range of behaviors produced by the unique military system that he sketches with Starcraft as inspiration.