Wowers. I haven’t been keeping up with the PNM-based blogging that Dan and the folks at Coming Anarchy have been working on. Really excellent work. It fills me with intellectual envy, so I’m going to focus on complimenting and discussing these fine efforts instead of wallowing in jealousy that I’m not doing this.

First of all, Barnett’s Core-Gap (or Core-New Core-Gap) model has been aching for this sort of treatment. Whether reading through Foreign Policy’s Failed State Index or Transparency International’s Corruption Index, the global distribution of McDonald’s or GDP distribution, I keep thinking to myself “how does this correlate with PNM? In fact, hanging on my wall right now is a scrap of paper with the following scrawled in red pen:

Use Google Earth to create overlays for:
-’arc of instability’
-’Islam’s bloody borders’
-failed state index
-freedom index
-economic wealth index
-US military interventions
-UN peacekeepers?
-NATO deployments?
-Friedeman’s McDonald’s and Dell ‘theories’

And I know it isn’t just me. I have repeatedly found myself discussing with others about how the four flows of globalization explain the underlying security dyamics better than the other alternatives that get thrown out… but I haven’ t had the data to back up my tough talk with evidence.

So. Enough gushing. On to the substance.

Chirol takes the military measures to the next level by looking at German, Canadian, and British deployments around the globe. I was particularly surprised to see how widely Canadian troups have been deployed. This is great data and it would be wonderful to pull it together into a single visualization.

Then there is Dan’s piece de la resistance. Regarding the problem of measuring “Brutality,” I agree with TM Lutas’s concerns about the Brutality Index Dan used. A possible improvement would be annual war deaths as a proportion of total population. I am thinking here of an updated version of data Lawrence Keeley presented in War Before Civilization (Fig 6.1 on page 89, for those of you keeping score at home). Keeley’s point was to illustrate the proportionally increased rates of death due to warfare within “Primitive” societies, but I wonder whether we would find a similar pattern when comparing Core and Gap nations in the 21st Century. At the very least, this would address the problem of penalizing nations that participated in peacekeeping deployments for being “brutal.”

And on an utterly tangential note, I recall a Boston Globe article several years back that discussed some research a political scientist or anthropologist did that correlated likelihood that a country would engage in warfare (or civil war or generally increase its instances of violence) with the proportion of young (~15-25 or so) men to available land (I forget how they measured that). The implication being, of course, that young men who faced little opportunity for economic success and self-realization (reflected analgously by the lack of land to buy and establish a life for himself) were more likely to turn to violence to try to address this problem. To check the correlation of this type of measure with the Core-Gap model would be particularly interesting since Barnett so often discusses the demographic aspects of the voyage from Gap to Core (i.e. the voyage from young to old).

All of this bears much more thought. Again, an excellent job by Coming Anarchy and Tdaxp.

I glace away for a moment and suddenly Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions is linking to OSD, thanks to my stumbling into Steve and Mark’s dialogue on resilience. Unpacking all of the twists and turns of these two sharp minds would take me several posts (besdies, I have complete faith that all of you are emininently capable of following the links to retrace the discussion yourself) so I will just dive in.

There are two related ideas here. One way to understand them is as two aspects of resilience. The first issue is resilience on what Boyd would call the moral level. The second issue is resilience on a technical level. There is a complex feedback loop between these two aspects of resilience; it leads to both excitement and confusion. This is my attempt to explore that relationship. Be warned, my enthusaism might overwhelm my clarity.

Moral resilience is what Boyd focused upon late in his life and a topic that Chet Richards has expanded upon in Certain to Win. The issue they consider is why certain organizations have been able to consistently prevail against adversity. They have concluded that success depends upon maintaining internal cohesion while disrupting the cohesion of your adversaries. When Mark discusses the importance of consilience, I see him implicitly recognizing this. It is not sufficient to just bounce back quickly, because such a strategy is inherently reactive. It abdicates iniative, conceeding the most important factor to one’s competitors. While there aren’t any blueprints one can blindly apply to become resilient, there are some common characteristics of resilient organizations. None of these characteristics, notably, are technical.

Technical resilience is where SOAs and IT platforms come in. In Steve’s business world, he needs tangible (well, alright, more tangible than “moral resilience”) products to sell, and hence Enterra’s focus. The ability to plug-and-play reduces the costs of joining efforts, which I expect will produce a reinforcing feedback loop as the critical mass of players grows (which in turn attracts more players…). By removing the “it is too hard to do” excuse, effective IT (which is really what we’re talking about here) can help motivated actors from the NGO, military, diplo, and for-profit sectors achieve incredible results.

None of that can happen, however, without a compelling answer to the “why should I bother at all?” question. It may be simple, but what’s the point? This leads us back to the dynamics of moral resilience as examined by Boyd and Richards: how to create schwerpunkts and how to foster individual iniative within an organizing purpose.

In the 21st century, it will become more difficult to be resilient in one of these manners without being resilient in the other. An SOA will not change much of anything if it is merely being used to support 19th-Century style hierarchical bureaucratic processes. No, one needs a motivated and cohesive workforce to really make a SOA pay off. On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine a cohesive organization prevailing in this era without its employees being empowered by a robust IT infrastructure. These factors feed on one another. Motivated employees can take drastically more iniative when they are unburdened from unnecessary bureaucratic constraints and allowed to find the data they need when they need it in the format they want. Suddenly people are getting excited, somebody’s yelling or standing on his desk and people are scribbling diagrams on white boards.

The time is ripe for the SOA/resilient era’s equivalent of the blitzkrieg: a doctrine that links organizational structure and philosophy with appropriate technology. The center of gravity, as in any competitive endevor, remains the human mind. Technology can facilitate coordination towards a schwerpunkt, but it cannot provide the schwerpunkt. Development-in-a-Box can vastly reduce the friction generated when distributed and previously unconnected entities begin to work together. It does not motivate cooperation, any more than the radio motivated maneuver warfare. Still, effective IT will become the defining feature of this era’s most successful companies (it already is for companies such as Budweiser, Dell and Wal-Mart), just as the tank has become a symbol of the blitzkrieg. And this is proper, since it is what makes this era unique - even as the moral dynamics have existed for centuries and will continue to be relevent long after we have passed.

A major pipeline in Nigeria exploded today. The Red Cross currently puts the death toll at 100; I fear that number will rise before all is said and done.

John Robb has been tracking the growth of system disruption attacks in Nigeria. He even had a post up earlier to day (or late last night) where he discussed recent statements from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) expressing the desire to further decrease Niger’s oil production, but it has disappeared. When I read the headline my first thought was, “another GG attack.”

MEND, however, denies responsibility. Jomo Gbomo, the email-based spokesman of MEND, said in an email to Bloomberg that

All this works to our advantage in some ways… [but w]e wouldn’t want to kill so many innocents in any attack… I’m not a part of it.

One alternative explanation is that the explosion was an accident (due to the large number of villagers who had been stealing fuel from the pipe).

This is total speculation, but it is still possible that MEND was responsible for the explosion. It may have decided to deny responsibility upon seeing the atrocious death toll. Since it seems that most of the victims of the explosion were Nigerians, MEND may have been concerned about destroying domestic support for their movement - as Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq organization damaged its standing among Iraqs due to its attacks upon Iraqi civilians.

As Robb has articulated in the past, one of the strengths of system disruption attacks is that they do not generally require killing. This has a range of benefits for global guerillas. First, it is easier for people to destroy inanimate objects than to take another human’s life. This makes it easier to recruit people to execute attacks. Second, since there are few deaths, the guerillas maintain a moral advantage relative to their opponents (who, if they are not careful, can appear hyperbolic if they resort to violence). To claim responsibility for this sort of massively fatal attack would contradict these tenets of GG strategy.

As I said, this is only speculation, but I think it provides a plausible reason for why MEND would want to deny responsibility.

Back in December I commented upon the significance of DoD 3000. To my surprise, when looking at what sites have been linking to OSD, I discovered that a surprising number of folks have been finding their way here through google searches for “DoD 3000.” Which led me to look at what they’ve been looking at, which in turn led me to two perspectives I didn’t catch at the time: Fred Kaplan and Douglas Johnson.

Kaplan emphasizes the need to follow up on the directive with incentives, specific goals and budget authority. Otherwise, he warns, it won’t be taken seriously and it will be “waved off as empty rhetoric.”

Johnson has similar concerns, arguing that the directive

really does nothing more than direct the establishment of policies, the conduct of exercises and the offer to other U.S. Government (USG) departments to “come train with us” once we figure out what that training will be.

So, what has happened since then? First of all, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 44 which made the State Department the lead federal agency for stability operations. DoD followed up by establishing a stability operations office in the Pentagon and then got a British Colonel to run it (subscription required).

So this is a mixed bag. If stability operations are supposed to be given “priority comparable to combat operations,” an office in the Pentagon isn’t going to make that happen by itself. After all, where is the warfighting operations office in the Pentagon? On the other hand, individual services have already been adapting on their own, which gives these higher-level iniatives some momentum. There have been numerous articles, for example, detailing how the Army has turned its desert training range at Fort Irwin from a Cold War-centric tank battlefield into a counterinsurgency labratory complete with (fake) al-Jazera reports and roadside bombs. (On a lighter note, I was paralyzed by a spasm of guffaws when I read that Carl Weathers, aka Apollo Creed of Rocky fame, has been coaching the “insurgents” on their acting abilities.) Another example of gathering momenum was the Army’s 2005 Strategic Planning Guidance (SPG), which emphasized the need to improve stability operations (subscription required).

One angle that none of these articles addressed, however, was the question of how to prepare for close collaboration with everyone from USAID to foreign governments to global NGOs and private businesses. Tom Barnett and John Robb have been thinking a great deal about (with Enterra Solutions, of course, leading the way in the private sector).

The big buzzword here is service oriented architectures (SOA). True, on-the-fly interoperation and adaptation requires services. Imagine USAID being able to use DoD logistics services, for example. Or suppose that during a humanitarian relief operation, a global guerilla group starts attacking the trucks delivering the aid shipments. Suddenly convoys need to be organized to protect the trucks. How to draw together all of the NGO, private businesses donating goods and the military resources? Use the pre-existing logistics and personnel services to assemble a service. The platform is the center of gravity where all the players can come together and get integrated. I was thinking a month or two ago about an “off-the-shelf” logistics toolkit for NGOs along these lines. Building such a toolkit (which is what Rathyon’s DIB, described by Robb, would enable) would be a huge step towards improving our ability to deal with MOOTW and its what I’ve always imagined Barnett meant when he was talking about the US being the “Hub” of the SysAdmin force.

I’m starting to move a little fast and loose here, but I think the idea still comes through.

Shikha Dalmia tells us to Defend America, Buy More Iranian Oil. Her reasoning echos my arguments regarding those who ominously intone that we couldn’t go a week without Chinese imports. As Ralph Peters breathlessly gasped in “The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs,”

…try to go a single week without buying or using a product made in China. A conflict with Beijing might be lost on the empty shelves of Wal-Mart.

This one-sided interpretation does not devote a single sentence to discussing China’s fundamental dependence upon the American consumer. Naturally China will appear more threatening if one ignores the role exports have played in China’s meteoric growth and the regime’s need to maintain that growth (lest it lose control of the population).

Dalmia makes a similar point regarding the national security implications of oil imports, stating that “Our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is only the flip side of their dependence on our purchases. ” Expanding upon the nature of this dependence, Dalmia argues that

…beneath all of Iran’s saber-rattling and its threat to retaliate against Israel in the event of a U.S. attack, it realizes how suicidal such a move would be… [Iran’s] concern is not so much for the world’s oil consumers, of course, as for the economic consequences for his own country. The Iranian government depends on oil exports for nearly half of its total revenues. If it cuts these exports, buyers could go to other suppliers. But there is not much else that Iran could sell to other countries to replace its lost oil revenues.

Ultimately, all of the bluster on each side - Iran’s nuclear ambitions and oil embargo whispers or American war plans and shows-of-force - is jockeying for position within the larger context of negotiations over the future of Iraq in addition to Iran’s desire to leave parriah status and become a power on the global stage (last two links subscription only).

I have been reading Henry Yarger’s monograph, “Strategic Theory for the 21st Century: The Little Book on Big Strategy”, and I am finding it to be a mixed bag.

As a survey its scope is limited, yet it still balloons out to a turgid 85 pages. It attempts to provide a structure within which to understand the role of strategy and its relation to planning, tactics and policy. In lieu of substance, it offers contradictory platitudes like the following:

…periods of stability are the best time to contemplate bold shifts in strategy…

…periods of major instability are the best time to advocate bold, broad strategies (p38).

There are nuggets of gold, however. For example, Yarger provides a concise description of how the abstract concepts of grand strategy, policy and tactics map to specific national security documents. He even sums it up in this graphic, eminently appropriate for dropping into Power Point slides.

Returning to the question of scope, however, I am frankly shocked that neither Sun Tzu nor Basil Liddell Hart made it into Yarger’s bibliography. (One of the reasons I slogged through this paper paper was to gather more sources for my developing cannon of strategic theory.) I was pleased to see John Lewis Gaddis, and was intrigued by the frequent references to Colin Gray (have to add him to me to-read list). Clausewitz, however, seemed to be one of the only primary thinkers represented. Many of the sources cited seem to be secondary and tertiary thinkers who concern themselves with meta-strategy.

I must admit some wariness of devoting too much of my extremely constrained reading time to such material. As Wohlstetter put it in an article (whose title currently escapes me and I don’t have access to my personal library right now) he was wary of studying theory for fear that he would end up more concerned with the trappings of thought and yet none of the rewards. He likened the trappings of theory to safari equipment (pith helments, khaki tunics, elephant guns) and avered that he did not wish to become one who contented himself with a never-ending quest to properly equip himself and never actually went on safari. Such Safari fantasies can be entertaining, but I share Wohlstetter’s desire to avoid living them (after all, I want to somehow actually make a difference.

As I read on, however, I realize that I’ve been excessively hard on Yarger. I stand by my characterization of the first half of his monograph as pudgy, but he has some very solid material in the latter half.

First of all, he begins to emphasize the importance of strategy being flexibile and adaptable. The danger, of course, is in reducing strategic thinking to “simple assumptions that are often ill-founded” in the attempt to reduce strategy to planning.

Secondly, Yarger recognizes the need for strategy to be articulated in such a manner that it “resonates with multiple audiences.” He doesn’t explain why this is important, but readers of this blog are already familiar with Boyd’s definitive answer to this question (namely to “Pump-up our resolve, drain-away our adversary’s resolve, and attract the uncommitted”).

Third, I appreciate that Yarger emphasizes the importance of rigorously considering one’s objectives: “Objectives too seldom receive the depth of tought and reflection they merit.” Decision analysts will recognize this danger from experience with some expensive analysis that devoted 95% of its time and money on modifying models and only 5% of its time asking what the proper scope of the analysis ought to be.

Fourth, Yarger recognizes the “alluring trap of strategic monism.” Reductionsim at its most dangerous, strategic monism is the belief that a single strategic concept fits every scenario. “Usually the appeal appears to lie in its directness, application of technology, and appearance of efficiency.” Yarger cites the US military’s emphasis on precision strike as a potential example of strategic monism. I would add EBO to that list.

As I finish the monograph, I may add more thoughts to this rambling record of my thinking.

I am not about to start a quixotic quest to tilt with all of the strawmen spawned by Fed X’s commentary on Barnett. With this commitment in mind, I want to try to address a tangential issue that arose while reading his post (and its comment thread).

The issue regards terminology. It is incoherent to mix the “first world, second world, third world” construct with Barnett’s “Core-Gap” construct. The former was a description of the Cold War environment and the latter is an attempt to describe our current global environment. This distinction has been blurred because during the 1990s, terms like “third world” came to be used as a vague label for regions that were poor, exploited and undeveloped, while “first world” came to be used as a label for wealthy, modernized and (depending upon one’s political stripes) exploiting regions. The original definitions of these terms (First World = US & Allies, Second World = USSR, satellites and allies, Third World = everyone in between) were no longer valid, yet we kept using them based upon the associations each term had accumulated over the course of the Cold War. Thus, Somalia was still third world, while the EU, Japan and the US were still first world. This vocabulary drift continued, mirroring the larger strategic drift in US policy. Messy issues like “how do we label India and China?” couldn’t be addressed due to the outdated nature of the vocabulary.

Barnett’s Core-Gap vocabulary, then, is an attempt to update our labels to reflect our current world. We may disagree on how to accurately describe our world, but we must agree that our currently environment is different from our old. This means that even if we disagree on everything else, we must agree that reverting to old labels is sloppy and counter-productive.

On an utterly unrelated note, in case anyone is actually keeping track, it may be a few more days until I resume my normal (admittedly sporadic) posting rate.