Steve Biddle, one of the sharpest minds in defense analysis:

The “great divide” between the low intensity conflict crowd who say wars along Iraq and Afghanistan lines will be the future and those who say we need to prepare to fight China, seems rather out of place, Biddle said. Historically, wartime theater and grand strategy address a specific enemy, the one you’re fighting, Much current debate assumes the real defense challenge is the next war. “Building a military that’s balanced across the demands of an actual war that we’re fighting right now and a future war against opponents who we can’t yet identify is an unusual response to a wartime planning problem.”

Read the whole thing.

In a fast moving and rapidly evolving environment, your competitive advantage isn’t what you know but what you can learn. If you have very well-defined job responsibilities (especially extending to what you don’t do), then it is likely that you are in a position that will have lots of people who could potentially do it just as well as you.

A related point. If a majority of what you do can be routinized, then an algorithm will be written to do it. You will then be in a position where many of the others who can do your job are machines and software. You don’t want them to be setting your wage.

Final thought - given this, are we entering a new age of the liberal arts**? That is to say, we don’t need armies of technical specialists but rather lots and lots of people broadly educated with the meta skills to learn new material.

**When I say liberal arts, I am not using it as a pejorative euphemism for English majors. I am talking about people broadly educated across mathematics, history, the arts and philosophy.

More halting steps towards SysAdmin.
The FY09 Civilian Stabilization Initiative [pdf] creates a three-tied structure:

A 250 person active response corps, employed by DoS and available for immediate deployment.

A 2000 person standby response corps, employed by the federal government (and holding different day jobs) who receive training and are available to participate in surge activities on relatives short notice.

A 2000 person civilian reserve corps, composed of people employed outside of government who receive training and are available to participate in surge activities.

Stimson wrote a report that summarizes all of this and provide recommendations to increase the active response corps to 500.

Something that these reports don’t address is the institutional resistance these functions create. How will DoS create the planning culture and acquire the equipment necessary to support these functions? Ultimately, the resources necessary to do this will come at the expense of core diplomacy functions, just as security, stabilization, transition and reconstruction resources in DoD come at the expense of big war planning and training. Where is the bureaucratic center of gravity for these functions?

From Gibson:

“You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ve scarcely ever had held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.”

“Not entirely through want of trying,” she reminded him.

“No,” he said, but when you try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.”

“Hurbertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she suspected, perhaps not quite literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had also been exceptionally dull company.

“It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the thing’s it’s a by-product of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.”

Gibson illustrates concepts like this and captures the experience of modernity for super-empowered individuals (whether they’ve been empowered willingly or not) with an errie precision. A good complement to one’s professional reading.

A French and a British SSBN collided in the Atlantic earlier this month… which begs the question - what were these two boats doing so close together in the first place? A collision between two SSNs or an SSN and SSBN would make more sense.

Anyone know anything more?

Defense tech has a post up on a recent DSB report that yet again discusses the problem of how to acquire and train a force for an environment that seems to continue to surprise us.

The DSB study calls for the Pentagon to educate Congress about the problem and to create a new office to advise senior military leaders “of high risk potential red capabilities” and how to handle them. The new office, to be known as the Capability Assessment, Warning and Response Office, would warn senior leaders of high risks, come up with options to counter them, and recommend technological approaches, the study says.

The DSB also recommends that the Pentagon embrace red teaming throughout it structure… In addition to red teaming, the military must place much more emphasis on rapid fielding of capabilities and create a Rapid Capability Fielding Office that would report directly to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

I’m wary of any approach that hopes, however implicitly, to institutionalize strategic thinking. Strategic thinking cannot be routinized, yet that is what one attempts if one tries to fix an undefined challenge like “unexpected threats” through bureaucracy.

No set of instructions, whether capabilities-based or otherwise, substitutes for having active strategic minds tackling a problem. It’s fuzzy and it resists an engineering approach, but that’s the nature of the challenge.

If this Capability Assessment, Warning and Response Office can serve as a center of gravity for strategists - a place where they can hang their hats and collect a paycheck - then it might be a valuable improvement. But you still need to find and recruit strategists to work in the office, which will require a leader with the autonomy to hire the types of people he or she thinks will help.

These people should be voracious consumers of information, excel at rigorous abstract thinking, and be conversant with the uses and limits of quantitative techniques. There should be a wide range of backgrounds, including history, operational experience from the military, business, policy analysis and mathematics. They must have some autonomy in seeking out interesting problems and developing them (along the lines of Google’s one day a week policy of independent projects). The office requires lifelong learners who look deeply at situations and wrestle with undefined problems.

During RAND’s golden age (roughly 1950-1961), new employees generally had at least a year to rattle around the company looking into things and figuring out the lay of the land. It’s a shocking proposition to consider in today’s world of hourly accounting systems and contract auditing. But it reflected a deep faith that RAND leadership had in its hiring managers. If they brought bright, highly motivated and creative thinkers together, they trusted that these people would do something worthwhile often enough to justify the times when they didn’t.

It all flies in the face of scientific management. We can explore new ways to managing this sort of organization - perhaps using tools like prediction markets to assess whether analysts are producing accurate analysis. But one cannot get around the need for finding the right type of thinkers. Otherwise, it won’t matter what their office is called or who it reports to.

Mullen asks for a civilian surge in Afghanistan. This is the short-term need. For the long-term perspective, check Mullen’s speech from last week where he estimates that it will take 10 years to develop sufficient capabilities in other agencies to take the SysAdmin portfolio from DoD.

This theme is going to keep coming up. The Stimson Center ran a study last summer looking at it. I’m sure lots of other think tanks are getting into the issue. Please share any links to studies you’re familiar with.

Unprecedented collision of two satellites in orbit. A topic to watch.

Had the opportunity to catch Barnett tonight on his Great Powers tour. It was a collector’s edition presentation - Barnett without powerpoint (sort of like an unplugged concert). It seemed to take him a little while to warm up during his prepared remarks, but he really hit his stride in Q&A. Check it out on CSPAN when it airs.

I can’t wait to get to the book, but my to-read pile has been growing at an alarming rate that absolutely overwhelms my rate of consumption (a fact that prompted a welcome gift that I would recommend to anyone else who suffers from this same challenge - which is to say the entire readership of this blog).

Barnett’s acknowledgments from Great Powers thank a who’s who of strategic bloggers.

It’s a classy move. Easy to do, but easy to forget too. I’m flattered to be on the list.