Robb:

Economic dislocation due to a string of recessions and persistent inflation in the developed world as every increasing energy costs percolate through the global economy. Global guerrillas in the US?

How much economic dislocation would be necessary before demand destruction brought oil demand in line with lower levels of oil supply? How many recessions would pass before an adjustment? What hedging options could companies invest in to mitigate the disruption?

So that’s what the Iranians were on about.

Excellent IEEE article on open-source war (OSW). (H/T, John Robb)

It characterizes the insurgent’s rate of innovation:

According to some estimates, it now takes Iraqi insurgents less than a month to adapt their methods of attack, much faster than coalition troops can respond. “For every move we make, the enemy makes three,” U.S. Brigadier General Joe E. Ramirez Jr. told attendees at a May conference on IEDs. “The enemy changes techniques, tactics, and procedures every two to three weeks. Our biggest task is staying current and relevant.”

And then contrasts this with the lumbering dinosour of the DoD acquisitions process:

Unfortunately, the traditional weapons acquisition process, which dictates how the United States and other Western militaries define and develop new weapons systems, is simply not designed to operate on such a fleeting timescale. It can take years and sometimes decades—not to mention many millions or billions of dollars—for a new military machine to move from concept to design to testing and out into the field. Worse, the vast majority of the battlefield technologies now wending their way through the acquisition bureaucracy were intended to fight large force-on-force battles among sovereign nations, not the guerrilla warfare that typifies the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

A long term danger is that after the trauma of OEF and OIF, this process will return to the status quo ante bellum and get back to focusing on large-scale war fought with enormously complex weapons systems.

That would be a mistake.

This is a massive example of more effective incentive structures overwhelming less effectives ones. I saw Newt Gingrich speak last week about his new book, and his thesis could be summed up as this: economic incentives work better than bureaucracy. Several GAO reports on DoD acquisitions have pointed out that without reformed incentive structures, no substantive change will occur. And there are many more examples.

So here’s a question, how do we make the SysAdmin-industrial complex work more like an open-source movement?

A big component has to be an engaged population of self-organizing people who take the iniative to assess where the geostrategic environment is heading and move themselves there in anticipation of DoD, DoS, and DHS getting there.

I mentioned OODA loops in my title. Here’s a connection. Decentralized innovation, aligned towards a larger goal either through an open-source-style platform or a DARPA Grand Challenge-esque cash prize, offers more opportunities for failed trials. More failed trials mean more experience seeing what works and what doesn’t, which trains one’s orientation (to paraphrase Chet Richards, “The only useful news is bad news”). More opportunities to interact with one’s environment will offer more opportunities to test one’s orientation and find opportunities for innovation. It’s not just faster OODA loops that matter, it’s smarter ones.

Such an approach stands in clear contrast to the planning and analysis-centric processes of DoD acquisitions. The system’s going to crack further before it reforms. Companies that reposition themselves sooner will reap the rewards on the other side.