Following up on the terminology of the Long War, here are some more details on the NCTC memo:

“Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims,” says officials should use “terms such as ‘death cult,’ ‘cult-like,’ ’sectarian cult,’ and ‘violent cultists’ to describe the ideology and methodology of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”

How about calling them “global salafi militants”?

FPRI offers window into Robert Kaplan’s current thinking. His ultimate conclusion: we’re returning to “a world of 19th-century balance of power on several different levels.” What I found most interesting, however, was the implied commentary on strategic trade-offs, force composition and force planning questions.

Kaplan emphasized navies because right now the U.S. is obsessed with low-tech land wars, even though 70-80 percent of all goods and commercial items in this globalized age travel by sea.

Contained with “obsessed” is a melange of half-truths and vague assertions. The US is devoting considerably more attention to counterinsurgency and SSTR than it was seven years ago, but then it was devoting hardly any attention to COIN in 2000. The description is also misleading because the DoD budget remains strikingly unobsessed with low-tech wars.

Counterinsurgency will certainly play a part in America’s future, he said, but probably only a part.

This is a complete strawman; no one argues that counterinsurgency will be the entirity of America’s future.

We’re well into the thick of the fight over the defense establishment’s capability portfolio for the 21st Century. Legacy interests use a host of arguments to make COIN and low-tech, low-intensity warfare sound like it has been over emphasized. So you’ll read lots of articles warning that SSTR is “only a part” of the future missions set (a statement no one argues with), or that current conflicts don’t represent future conflicts, or that we’ve dangerously neglected our traditional hard-power assets with an excessive focus on COIN. “Procurement holidays” and “neglected threats” figure prominently in these arguments.

Service culture, rivalries and inertia play a large role in all of this, as do organizational dynamics. One cannot understand the shape of the debate without including these dimensions.

The debate needs to establish the relative importance of these capabilities. Sure, in a perfect world it would be great to have a 600 ship navy with the latest technology, a 1,000,000 strong army with soldiers specializing in every form of operation from SSTR to traditional armor-heavy engagements with high-tech adversaries and an air force fielding cutting-edge UAVs and UCAVs while also deploying 5th generation fighters while researching their 6th generation replacements. But strategy is all about trade-0ffs, relative importance and setting priorities. This article makes it seem that Kaplan sidesteps these - the most important questions - with vague simplifications. One could devote billions to returning America’s submarine industry to its Cold War peak. Or those billions could be spent on UCAVs. Or on expanding Army end-strength. The question for a strategist is, which one makes more sense?

In all of this, one of the dynamics to track is how the various services prepare and respond for the aftermath of Iraq. Do any of them take the SSTR mission seriously, or will they all work to expunge any trace of the experience and organizational adapatations from themselves (as they did after Vietnam)? Given how hostile existing organizational dynamics are to SSTR missions, if one does not argue aggressively for including these capabilities into future force planning, then one is tacitly supporting a complete return to traditional scenarios and priorities.

Brave New War inspired a broad range of reactions. The most useful criticisms I read faulted it for lacking any rigorous exploration of long-term remedies.

Robb looks to be addressing this criticism head-on with his next book on resilient communities. I see this as the prescription following the diagnosis of Brave New War. Given the future of war, what does the future of peace need to look like in response? This perspective seems to be reflected in his new (at least to me) “About” page where he explicitly ties these two threads of thought together.

The resilient community, however, is just one component of the broader reaction to Robb’s diagnosis of future of war. A necessary component, perhaps, but not sufficient. One of the things I’m thinking about is what cross-community platforms support resilience. Put another way, what changes do governments need to make in order to become resilient? Following this line of thinking leads to a realignment of the DoD’s strategic priorities. Instant infrastructure represents one of the critical capabilities for prevailing in future SSTR environments. As Robb described it:

[We need to think about investing in] communities in a box. One of the things we see again and again is the need for the ability to provide instant infrastructure to damaged communities. This ranges from a community cut off due to security needs in counter-insurgency to disaster relief. How do you package infrastructure for 20-30,000 people in a box? The military should be solving this.

In this context, assured electrical power is a strategic asset. OSD leaders should think systematically about growing the DoD’s capability to deploy instant electrical infrastructure during the “golden window” in order to assure that we prevail in future SSTR operations.

Previous OSD posts on this topic:
Global Guerillas and Instant Infrastructure
Green Power for SysAdmin

In post-war and post-disaster environments, populations will give authorities a window of opportunity to make things better. There will be insufficient time to harden the indigenous infrastructure during this window, especially because it is vulnerable to the type of disruption attacks being demonstrated in Iraq. Electrical power grips are particularly vulnerable to such disruption. If SSTR forces cannot demonstrate concrete improvements during this window, then serious downstream consequences result, including:

devolution of primary loyalties away from the state,

the rise of local entrepreneurial providers of electrical power,

stunted economic growth and

the emergence of competitors for national power.

Mastering the “golden window” requires thinking ahead and creating a platform that facilitates the rapid deployment of instant, resilient infrastructure in order to head off the development of downstream problems. It is about shaping the environment and controlling the perturbations caused by the vertical shock (whatever it was, be it a natural disaster, a war or a terrorist attack).

David Axe discusses the strategic influence of amphibious assault ships like the Fort McHenry (LSD 43):

For decades, the U.S. Navy built its forces and operations around large nuclear aircraft carriers equipped to wage major conventional wars, especially against the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, the 100,000-ton, $5-billion-per-ship carriers remained — but without a serious enemy to fight. Meanwhile the traditional concentration of naval forces around carriers left vast swaths of sea vulnerable to pirates, smugglers and insurgents. The Africa Partnership Station breaks the carrier’s death-grip, pushing small groups of vessels into troubled regions where they can help local navies secure their own waters.

While carrier strike groups won’t be going away any time soon, the increasing use of amphibious assault ships for SysAdmin missions raises awareness of their strategic influence. These platforms serve as hubs for the interagency and government-NGO-foreign nation partnerships that characterize these missions:

International teamwork was evident throughout Nowell’s command. His chief of staff was French navy Cmdr. Bertrand Daniel. African officers, including Ghanaian navy Cmdr. Samuel Walker, served as permanent liaisons. At port stops, Fort McHenry hosted local security forces for training events — 1,500 in all — and debarked sailors, Marines and aid workers from U.S. AID and Catholic Relief Services, among other groups, to do training and humanitarian work ashore. Off the coast of Senegal, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with their base on Fort McHenry, deployed buoys to study climate change.

Has anyone seen any after-action reports or lessons-learned studies examining how these missions navigated the interagency, government-NGO and international coordination challenges? I’d expect to see a great deal of innovation coming out of these operations, with important consequences for the larger movement to improve our SSTR capability.

Previous OSD posts on this theme:
Not, Decidedly a 20th Century Arms Race
USS Peleliu Humanitarian Mission

About time:

Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as “jihadists” or “mujahedeen,” according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. Lingo like “Islamo-fascism” is out, too.

The reason: Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.

Exactly. The aim is to isolate our enemies, not to unnecessarily create new ones through the use of sloppy language. This is a point I’ve made before.

It’s long overdue, since Dr. Streusand and LTC Tunnell made essentially the same point two years ago. [pdf]

An example of someone on the ground using open-source software to shrink the gap.

In December 2007, Coto Solutions launched a pilot project with Servicio Serigraphia en Chirqui (SSCH) in David, Panama, to see how technology might affect a typical Latin American small business. Four old donated laptops, open-source software, and a low-cost server were used to computerize its operation. The project’s main objective was to create an affordable computer network with a measurable bottom line impact that could readily be replicated at other their small businesses.

Four laptops, 6 to 8 years old, were donated by Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts. They were ideal for this project because of their portability and battery to address regular power outages that plague Latin American countries. The laptops were given wireless connectivity by purchasing inexpensive USB WiFi cards. With the help of Coto Solutions, SSCH was also able to buy a basic HP Pavilion Server to host data and applications.

No time to blog it fully, but a good op-ed by Andrew Hoehn and David Ochmanek from RAND on what the ongoing DoD review of roles and missions ought to consider.

Haven’t had time to read all the back material yet, but Shlok’s post reminded me of another point that I took away from the symposium on complexity I mentioned in my last post.

Often when discussing complex systems and emergence, one hears evolutionary dynamics offered as a way out of the maze. Instead of directly designing a system to prevail in a complex environment, we create an environment within which such a system will emerge.

My concern is this: Evolution is a wildly wasteful process. The vast majority of mutations fail. That’s fine if your time-scale is long and the cost of failure is negligible. This is how genetic algorithms work - the cost of failure is nil (culling binary strings has zero marginal cost) and current computing power allows thousands of generations to be simulated in minutes. If we start talking about weapons systems, however, what is the cost of failure and how long does it take to generate a new generation?

Related to this challenge is the idea that we know how to construct an environment that will select for what we want. Again using the genetic algorithm (GA) example, a major part of the art of GAs is finding a good heuristic - i.e. determining the appropriate selection criteria. Part of the process is basic trial and error. You try a heuristic, discover that it leads you someplace you hadn’t expected, go back and tweak it, and start the process again. When me move from the realm of computer algorithms to bending steal and building physical systems, would such a learning process become prohibitively expensive?

In short, if we think that evolutionary dynamics offer the silver bullet for overcoming the challenge of designing systems that will prevail in a complex environment, then what gives us confidence in believing we can manufacture and aim that bullet?

Really fascinating discussion of complexity science, or the science of emergence. (H/T John Robb)

If you look at the development of the Internet, or the power grid, or new chips, or airplanes there’s something disturbing happening. The companies that do these things have a secret that they don’t want people to know: they’re struggling to be able to continue developing their systems. What’s hurting the chip companies isn’t the cost of the fab, as bad as that is, but the cost of taping out of a chip. When you want to place a billion transistors, the design tools don’t work any more. They assume that at some point somebody understands what they want to make, but it doesn’t work when the system gets large enough. The companies that work on airplanes or the power grid don’t really understand them as wholes any more. This means that, in a world of thermodynamic-scale engineering, you have to make a transition from designing systems to designing principles by which systems work, without actually saying how they do it.

The notion of such emergent engineering is very attractive. It’s inspired beautiful demonstrations, but those have generally been on toy problems that don’t scale to the really hard ones. And it’s inspired equally beautiful theories that generally don’t get reduced to practice. My colleague John Doyle calls these unfortunate examples of the study of “chaocritiplexity.” There’s a nearly null set of deep insight into emergent functionality that’s reduced to useful practice.

I used to be very critical of this state of affairs, until I finally realized that what I’m asking for is a step roughly as profound as the invention of calculus, or of information theory. Bringing rigor to emergence means developing a missing language. At MIT you learn about things like bandwidth, power, and signal-to-noise ratios. Late in life you learn about how to balance notions like hierarchy, adaptation, and fanout. By the time we’re done that’s going to be inverted. The very first thing you’ll learn at MIT is how to ask and answer questions like “How quickly should a system be able to modify itself? How many mistakes should it make? Which of its functions should be global and which local?” The kind of taxonomy that biologists do has to turn into predictive design theories. Shannon did that once. He showed that the channel capacity, that threshold I was talking about, is equal to bandwidth times the logarithm of 1 plus the signal-to noise ratio. That let you suddenly take these disparate attributes and, independent of the details of a particular design, learn how to price them and trade them off. We don’t know how to do that yet for hierarchy and adaptation and emergence, but there are compelling hints of an answer lying at the intersection of statistical mechanics, control theory, and geometry, mixed in with a bit of inference.

A few years ago, in the middle of a symposium on complexity science, a colleague turned to me and asked “is there anything we’ve seen today that doesn’t reduce to network theory?” I thought about it and agreed that the day had essentially been applications of network theory (with some agent-based simulation thrown in). This is what is so important to understand about complexity science right now. It is more a label to describe the deep connections that we feel like have to exist between the fields of control theory, network theory, information theory and system dynamics. There is no “there” there yet. And that’s what makes it so important; the 21st Century Leibniz or Newton hasn’t emerged yet.