Vague Suspicions and A Passing Thought....
- so I wondered to myself when I read the lead post on this thread, is this in anyway a reflection of any conflict and antagonism against the COIN philosophy? I wondered to myself given the open-house approach COIN has to the more closed-house approach traditionalists have. COIN sees civilian input and interfacing as a potential resource, traditionalists see it otherwise and more in the negative. I'm probably wrong, but if the troops are rubbing shoulders too much with civilians that means they are getting too many civilian ideas, which I don't think sits real well with some traditionalists.
So what is OPSEC really all about?
The high level answer is risk management.
Risk management is tied very much to the personality of the risk managers and their levels of risk aversion. Folks tend to have varying levels of risk aversion—the guy who routinely trades on E-trade is probably much more financially risk tolerant than the guy (having lived through the Great Depression and lost a fortune in the stock market crash) who socks away his dollars into a 10-year certificate of deposit. The college freshman who use Face Book and IM every day to communicate with friends and family is much less risk averse to the threats of the World Wide Web than the child of the
1950’s who learned how to add and subtract without the benefit of a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. Likewise, some commanders are much less likely to accept certain kinds of unmitigated risks than others. The Cav officer who is used to running economy of force operations probably has much more risk tolerance than the Mech Infantry guy who was always part of operations that had a 3:1 force ratio against the bad guys.
The critical factor that I think that needs emphasizing is that we cannot really decide which risks to accept, which to avoid, and which to mitigate unless we fully understand what those risks are. We tend to fear (that is be risk averse to) that about which we know the least. (Am I right here, MarcT?) As an aside, I also think that we tend to try to regulate away the risks about which we know the least.
I suspect the latest effort to control the electronic environment , AKA AR 530-1, is really a well-meaning, but poorly informed, effort to manage risk by some very risk averse (because of their poor understanding of the true nature of the risk) senior leaders.
A couple of metaphors for the "problem" of the ubiquity of electronic communications come to mind. The first is Pandora's box. Another is the apple in the Garden of Eden. But one I really like is, in the words of the old song, "How you gonna keep them down on the farm now that they've see Paree?" Rather than compaining about folks who stick their heads in the sand, I'd like to know how we get those ostrich-like decision makers on the tour bus to France?
We will speak only French here
From Marc,
Quote:
A TDY to examine the recruitment potential of "disaffected French 'youth'" ? Well, one old saw deserves another - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
Marc, why does some of this remind me of the "we are French and so to preserve frenchiness, we must disdain all things non-french (or was that Montreal?).
The inability to predict /anticipate change and shape events as such to obtain an advantage vs. recalcitrant attitudes towards the global information environment that result in strategic inertia seems to be our recurring problem.
Why? For all the lip service paid to Transformation the emphasis has been on development of technology as a cure, vs. the application of technology by people (transformative thinking). This is why even with so many C4ISR assitance type tools, so many leaders still fail to recognize decision points in a timely matter (if at all) that allow them to put the enemy at a disadvantage. This seems to be the hallmark of centralized, bureacratic organizations vs. flat, decentralized ones - while both have values, there is a need to adapt/become flexible enough in the face of change to meet the needs of the problem at hand - I think this illustrates the need for more debate about how we prosecute this and future wars, and what type of organizations and leadership will be required to win them.
Senators support milblogs
Three Republican senators have written Secretary Gates asking him to take a took at the new regulation and weigh the need for individual expression.