At the end of last week’s post on Christopher Lamb and Irving Lachow’s article on Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking I mentioned the relationship between intuition and strategic decisionmaking.

By intuition I mean the type of Blink thinking explored by Malcolm Gladwell. An extensive amount of research across a diverse range of specialties indicates that humans have the ability to make exceptionally accurate assessments in moments. From psychologists being able to read minute expressions of emotion to produce an assessment of a marriage’s prospects for success to first responders being able to rapidly assess what lifesaving measures a patient needs, time and again documented evidence indicates that experts rely upon rapid, implicit assessments. Much of what it means to be an expert is the ability to make accurate assessments under such conditions.

This brings us to Boyd’s OODA loop, since it provides a model of how humans turn observations into actions. To an outside observer, an expert using “thin slicing” appears to be jumping straight from observation to action. Think of a baseball player hitting an off-speed pitch. At first glance, it seems that the batter’s adjustment and the pitch’s break occur simultaneously. The path from observing the pitch break to taking the action of swinging the bat appears to be instantaneous.

How Blink Thinking Appears
[modified from Dr. Richards slides]

If one watches the same sequence in slow motion, however, it becomes clear that the batter anticipated the pitch’s behavior. Before the pitch broke, the batter had already kept his weight and hands back, indicating that he had already adjusted to the pitch. What is actually happening, then, is that the batter has already observed a subtle tell that his previous experience allows him to recognize as an off-speed pitch. This orientation seamlessly leads to the proper action. By the time the pitch breaks, the batter has already anticipated where it will be and is already starting his swing.

How Blink Thinking Actually Occurs
[modified from Dr. Richards slides]

Orientation filters observation based upon past experience and starts an action - just like a reflex. The entire process - implicit orientation leading directly to action - is so rapid that it can appear instantaneous. One has to earn this ability, however. If one takes the time to explicitly orient to one’s observations, by analyzing and applying rational decision models, then the moment for action will have passed before one makes a decision. It is only through extensive experience that one can build up a sufficient experience base to allow implicit orientation. If the reflexive decisions flowing from those observations require physical action, then the training process must also include training one’s body in the necessary actions. Think of learning a martial art or learning to play a musical instrument. As David Klein explains,

The key to using intuition effectively is experience - more specifically, meaningful experience - that allows us to recognize patterns and build mental models. Thus, the way to improve . . . intuitive skills is to strengthen [the] experience base.[1]

As a side note, I’ll point out that in competitive interactions, an adversary’s first job is to disrupt these trained responses. This can be achieved by simply denying your opponent the chance to use them (this is like playing go instead of chess with a grandmaster), which forces them to develop an entire new set of responses. Often, however, external constraints prevent one from changing the context to this extent, leading to a more subtle approach. Instead of making an enemy’s entire training useless, one can instead present them with situations that appear to fit within their existing orientation but which actually contain significant differences. An instinctual response to the wrong stimuli will create mis-matches between an adversary’s orientation and the outside world. These mis-matches represent fleeting opporunities for you to exploit. Of course, it isn’t as easy as all that, because your opponent is trying to do exactly the same thing to you.

So what insights does this perspective offer for strategic decisionmaking at the Pentagon? Lamb and Lachow argue that it suggests the need for

practicing difficult decisions in life-like situations is decisionmaking exercises, which are thought experiments,
usually built upon well-defined scenarios that attempt to capture the essence of specific decisions. Although often conducted as games, they can also utilize virtual environments that allow players to participate while dispersed at great distances.

These exercises are necessary because

relying solely on real-world experience has two downsides. First, gaining experience this way is a time-consuming and inefficient process. Senior leaders with relatively short tenures in government need to develop intuitive decisionmaking capabilities quickly and in areas that meet immediate needs. Second, one of the ways that people learn via on-the-job training is by making mistakes (which is one of the best ways to learn). However,given the stakes associated with strategic decisionmaking in the Pentagon, such mistakes are often too costly to accept.

Training expert strategic decisionmakers is neither cheap nor quick. Examples from Gary Klein’s research indicate that it takes a regular practice of several hours a day for a decade to achieve expert status in an area. Last week, Tom Barnett pegged the necessary apprentiship time to become a grand strategist as “several decades.” While these may not be appropriate or feasible goals for all of our civilian decisionmakers at the Pentagon, they do illustrate the investment necessary if we expect them to be actual experts. It also suggests that we cannot honestly expect a senior decisionmaker to be devote this sort of time to training when he or she already is already fully consumed with fending off beaucratic skirmishes. Thus, the inefficiencies and non-cooperative elements of the DoD impair the ability of decisionmakers to make the strategic assessment that only they can perform. If one must spend all one’s time fighting to observe all the necessary data, then one will not have any time left to orient.

According to Lamb and Lachow , the problem is so severe that

former Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of Defense from both political parties are virtually unanimous in the belief that the Pentagon bureaucracy could be substantially cut, from 25 to 75 percent, without any degradation in the quality of decision support. Often the Office of the Secretary of Defense is singled out for particularly harsh criticism, but the Joint Staff also hoards information and defaults toward least common denominator products. Colin Powell once remarked that while he was the Chairman, the “sole purpose” of his 1,500-person staff “was to keep as much information away from me as possible, [thinking] let’s just give him what we want him to have, not what he needs.”

We don’t have to get this perfect, but we do have to do it better than our adversaries.

[1 ]Gary Klein, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work, 2004, p 36.

In case any readers haven’t already heard, Noah Shachtman (whose Defense Tech site is must-read material) has a new blog at Wired: Danger Room.

Not to be confused with Danger Doom (see below), Noah and his team already have some interesting posts up on everything from chlorine bombs to mind reading.

Garr Reynolds offers a Tufte-esque critique of the recently declassified OIF planning slides.

These slides were likely never projected on a screen. PowerPoint decks like this are instead often printed and used in the US government and military as a kind of document… Slides like these would not make for good visuals, but they do not make for good documents either. Even though the title of the slide (err, “page”) below is “Key Planning Assumptions,” the problem with presenting bullets like this is that important assumptions about each bullet point are left unstated and unexplained. Since printed slides like these are acting as de facto documents to be left behind and examined later, why not present the information with more written explanation and greater clarity in a properly written document which adheres to the principles of good writing and good document design?

Clear writing, clear speaking and clear thinking all reinforce one another, and all are necessary if we hope to make wise decisions.

Adam hooks on to the sci-fi/strategy connections theme. I really love Stephenson’s work (Cryptonomicon is an all-time favorite) but Gibson is right up there - especially Pattern Recognition. Given Adam’s previous discussions of TAZs, I’m surprised he didn’t bring up All Tomorrow’s Parties. It offers one of the most vivid descriptions of an autonomous zone I’ve ever encountered.

Adam offers some interesting thoughts on the concept of black globalization (and cites what has become, to my surprise, one of the most frequently linked posts here at OSD). His points regarding the existence of Gaps within the Core (such as lawless sections of the inner city) are good, and remind why the SysAdmin function applies both at home and abroad.

A point for further thought is whether there exists a useful distinction between general criminal activity and black globalization. Most of the time when I’ve talked about the former I’ve imagined transnational illicit activity such as pirated software, human trafficking, the international drug trade, and smuggling. While these illegal networks have contacts within the Core, I don’t know enough to understand whether they could effectively operate without overseas hubs in the Gap.

Adam raises the possibility that these illicit networks are sufficiently intertwined with legitimate globalization that they may never be separated. He questions whether they may perpetuate one another. This, in a Snow Crash/Diamond Age turn, could melt our current map into a scramble of digitalized independent tribes and communities that become increasingly self-reliant for security and energy.

What are the countervailing forces that impede this sort of dissolution? Given the global infrastructure needs of black globalization, could this foundation be maintained if the power of states and organizations of states waned? Lots more thinking to be done…

Senator Lugar had a must read op-ed in yesterday’s Washingon Times discussing the need to improve civilian forces for the Long War.

Increasingly, the military is taking on roles once reserved for civilian agencies, such as building schools and clinics, drilling wells and conducting public information campaigns.

This shift did not come from any explicit or deliberate policy, rather it emerged from the reality that DoD has the money and the bodies. This is a sub-optimal policy, however, because…

…we need diplomats who can shape complex bilateral relationships, repair and build alliances and navigate through a labyrinth of foreign languages and cultures. We need foreign aid experts who know how best to promote democratic practices and economic development. And we need communication professionals to get our message across to foreign audiences.
These civilians are our best hope for defusing religious extremism and defeating international terrorism long-term. They are found in the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other civilian agencies. The military’s encroachment into traditionally civilian activities risks blurring lines of authority and weakening the secretary of state’s lead role in foreign policy.
Worse, it could actually hurt our anti-terror efforts by giving too strong a military cast to our programs and policies, fueling suspicion and resentment overseas.

Sen. Lugar closes his op-ed with three policy recommendations.

Full authority for ambassadors. An ambassador is the personal representative of the president and must direct all U.S. government activities in-country. That means he or she must be consulted ahead of time on all planned U.S. military activities and programs, and must have authority to overrule the Pentagon when necessary.

AFRICOM’s emerging character already reflects this need to coordinate military action within diplomatic efforts.

One voice in foreign policy. All security assistance, like other foreign aid, should go through the secretary of state, who should rationalize and prioritize our many assistance programs according to the president’s strategic vision.

Of course, this requires an explicit grand strategy around which all of these elements of national power can be organized.

Match money to mission. Civilian foreign policy agencies get far less funding than they need. The administration should develop a comprehensive spending plan for robust diplomatic capability and assistance in every country important to our anti-terror campaign. Money should flow to the agencies with the expertise to accomplish the mission, rather than assigning the mission to whomever happens to have the money to pay for it.

Fixing these funding flows represents the logical final step in instantiating the grand strategy.

Great to see this.

By way of Armchair Generalist, this excellent passage from today’s LA Times:

Despite their known lethality, [IEDs] weren’t taken into account by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s program of military “transformation.” Indeed, Rumsfeld bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots deemed by its proponents so deadly to a foe that armor on U.S. military vehicles might be dispensed with altogether.

Such proponents seemed to take it on faith that information dominance could be so complete that situational awareness would replace armor. Reminds me of H.R. McMaster’s Crack in the Foundation: Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future War

Once it became impossible to ignore the threat of all kinds of “home-made” bombs, and EFPs in particular, Rumsfeld responded in orthodox fashion by throwing money at the problem.

A “joint IED defeat” task force was created to address the issue, and last year it was granted $3.32 billion, but with little result. True, each Humvee patrolling Iraqi roads now carries two specially designed jammers, costing $100,000 apiece, that jam radio signals detonating roadside bombs. The other side has simply switched to wire detonators or infrared systems. One hundred towers spouting remote cameras, at $12 million each, watch main roads for bomb planters, with no improvement in attack and casualty statistics.

The first thing to do is decide how you will fight in the future. Skipping this step and jumping to technology incurs prohibitive costs without any comparable improvement in capability.

Had occasion today to re-read this excellent interview with Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper. I’ve highlighted some key passages and emphasized some points in bold.

The first thing you have to understand is how you plan to fight in the future or in a particular engagement, a particular war. And once you understand how you’re going to fight, then you bring the technology to it. If you lead with the technology, I think you’re bound to make mistakes.

When one leads with technology, one is left with an overly technical view of warfare that attempts (implicitly or explicitly) to understand an intelligent adversary through the decomposition analysis of system engineering.

Intelligent adversaries don’t work like that. Instead, they think like this:

If I had watched what happened in Afghanistan and was an enemy of the United States, there are a number of things I would have been concerned about. And I would have wanted to have prepared myself not to be affected by them.

First, of course, is precision-guided munitions. It’s clear that if the United States can locate you on the ground and identify you, its ability to take you out is pretty much above 80 or 90 percent. So how do I avoid being a target? There are a number of things you can do in terms of reducing your signatures or disguising who you are. If you had the means, for instance, you could bring the stealth technology that we’re familiar with in aircraft to equipment on the ground. It’s unlikely that anyone like Al Qaeda or the Taliban could do that, but some more modern enemies might.

If I couldn’t do things like that, then I would certainly spread out. I wouldn’t present a target in one location. I would take advantage of places where America’s technology doesn’t work: in the cellars of buildings or in caves, where some of this technology can’t see or identify me. So I would focus on how to reduce my signature and take away the Americans’ ability to surveil and have reconnaissance on my positions.

War is about adapting. Any potential enemy as well as we, the United States, if we didn’t adapt, learn, and evolve from our past experiences, we would be a species or a nation that would not survive. And any enemy that wants to survive against the United States can’t fight like some of our recent enemies have, or they won’t survive.

Anyone getting any Boyd tingles?

[Regarding Millennium Challenge] I had a great deal of concern about the ideas that they were experimenting with in this particular exercise. I say that because I didn’t think the ideas were intellectually worthy of being tested for that sort of money. Unfortunately, from where I sat, and I think I had a pretty good view, these ideas were never truly tested. Yet the conclusion drawn at the end of the exercise was that they had been and that they were worthy of adoption by our operating forces. I think they’re very shallow. They are fundamentally flawed. They have no true intellectual content. And yet they’re being, in my view, foisted on our operational commanders.

… I’m angered that, in a sense, $250 million was wasted. But I’m even more angry that an idea that has never been truly validated, that never really went through the crucible of a real experiment, is being exported to our operational forces to use.

This might explain why blogging is so stimulating, yet is also susceptible to creating an echo chamber of crap thinking. And why it can make me feel manic sometimes ;-).

Strategic thinking, and what distinguishes the good from the bad, has been one of my long-running themes here at OSD. Reforming Pentagon Strategic Decisionmaking, Christopher Lamb and Irving Lachow’s article from an NDU Strategic Forum, ties together some excellent thinking on the subject.

After discussing past attempts to rationalize DoD decisionmaking, as well as the importance of both intuitive and rational decisionmaking processes, Lamb and Lachow lay out the current weaknesses in strategic planning.

To execute its ostensibly rational planning processes, the Pentagon is divided into hierarchical organizational structures that represent relatively narrow bodies of expertise (policy, intelligence, program analysis, acquisition, and budgeting). Within these bodies are subdivisions that further specialize in more narrowly defined subjects. Recently, Pentagon wits have taken to calling their stovepiped organizations “cylinders of excellence,” which is in fact what they are. Their purpose is to build and nurture deep expertise in a narrow body of knowledge. These experts identify issues, devise options and recommendations, and forward them up the chain to senior officials. In this regard, planning and decisionmaking are essentially bottom-up and stovepiped.

In terms more familiar to readers of Dr. Barnett and Zenpundit, the DoD has been emphasizing and rewarding vertical specialization. While Lamb and Lachow never explicitly say so, this vertical specialization comes at the expence of horizontal (i.e. truly strategic) thinking.

The value of these rational decision processes is limited by multiple bureaucratic and human factors. The Secretary and other senior leaders need integrated problem assessments and solution options, but their subordinates have few incentives to collaborate
in order to provide such products. Instead, subordinates are rewarded for developing and protecting their organizational equities. Since there is no incentive to sacrifice organizational equities for the common good, the natural outcome of a formal coordination process in the Pentagon is a least common denominator or consensus product for senior leaders that avoids and obscures the need for tough tradeoffs.

The end result is senior leaders rarely able to devote themselves to their core functions:
-providing strategic direction (by setting priorities),
-making major resource investments (to instantiate their strategic priorities),
-explaining strategic objectives and direction to internal and external audiences, and
-monitoring performance so that they can make the inevitable necessary adjustments.

As Lamb and Lachow sum up,

…strategic decisionmaking remains more personalized, centralized, and idiosyncratic than it should be, devoid of the ability to test hypotheses and see all reasonable alternatives.

Getting this right is essential, since our security environment has become increasingly dynamic and planning assumptions need to be revisited more frequently. Current force structure and training issues can be traced back to out-dated Cold War assumptions that remained unchanged far too long after their relevence had ended.

Lamb and Lachow’s solution to this problem - a Decision Support Cell - warms my heart as an analyst, I worry that it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. They dance around it throughout the article without ever stating it outright. We spend billions on analysis, yet continue to suffer a deficiency of strategic planning, because the DoD as an organization does not reward truly strategic analysis. You get the behavior you reward, not the behavior you ask for (or specify in memos). Lamb and Lachow argue that

Since the cell would have a holistic view of the multiple senior leader core functions, it would be in a position to advise the Secretary on the importance of keeping abreast of these issue areas.

Without a change in the overall behavior of the DoD, these analysts will starve on a lack of data and cooperation from the “cylinders of excellence,” and they won’t be able to build their holistic view. [Talking about “a holistic perspective,” by the way, is classic consultant BS. Unless we’re going to be balancing the DoD’s chakras and assessing the Pentagon’s Feng Shui, we aren’t taking a holistic view.] L & L argue that the Decision Support Cell is necessary to help the SECDEF enforce the necessary incentives to create better collaboration, but this dodges the question of whether creating a new organization is the most effective way to enforce new behaviors. Enforcement is a piece of the solution, but without a reformed incentive structure, the entire enterprise reverts to the status quo.

There is another post in here about the role of intuition (per Gladwell’s Blink, which is really just a popularization of Gary Klein’s excellent research), its role in strategic decisionmaking and how to nurture it, but it’s Friday afternoon and the mechanism’s running on empty. Have a good weekend all.