Strategy in the 21st Century

[OUTLAW 09]

I’ll be the first to argue that the modern world has always been complex, but I also agree that complexity is increasing and this has significant implications for those developing or executing grand strategies. I found an article recently that provides a concise description of the emergent challenges due to information technology enabled globalization. Like many SWJ readers, he too was frustrated with the use of complexity as a cliché, with little explanation on what it actually implied.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/...gle-keep-13698

“The Complexity Challenge: The U.S. Government’s Struggle to Keep Up with the Times”

“The world is complex’ is the U.S. government’s greatest strategic cliché and--paradoxically—its greatest strategic challenge.” By Josh Kerbel

Kerbel correctly points out that complexity is about interconnectivity and interdependence, both of which has been and continues to be greatly accelerated by globalization, and in the virtual world via information technology. Kerbal argues this is creating a world where it increasing difficult to find strategic mooring points. In other words it isn't simply Russia and China, or violent extremists, as Joshua Ramo stated in his book, "The Age of the Unthinkable," the global order is undergoing its most significant change since the Westphalia order was created.

Kerbel then looks at U.S. government leaders and points out they do not want to face this fact. They rather dismiss the obvious by making half true claims such as the world has always been complex, and globalization has been in existence for well over 300 years. He writes, this means the real world is

He makes the following arguments:

1. For the military, this implies there is much more to cross domain operations than simply focusing on the traditional physical domains and cyber, the human domain and its many dimensions (identity, economics, influence, political, etc.) increasingly will be decisive. Although joint doctrine addresses Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational (JIIM) operations, and refreshingly developed a relevant joint operations concept focused on adapting to globalization called "globally integrated operations," and they're working on an emerging concept tied to campaign planning that addresses the gray zone, the reality is in practice we are not able to effectively implement these concepts. Why? Legacy systems and bureaucratic infighting between various U.S. government interagencies. As Kerbel stated, most problems today require the synchronized approach of multiple agencies.



I'm back on my center of gravity soapbox, Kerbel points out our reductionist thinking leads us astray, and I argue our center of gravity of concept is a symptom of that mindset.



We have seen this repeatedly in recent history, no need to further elaborate.



This is what I believe is the biggest so what for strategists. We could never truly afford the luxury of focusing on one threat, e.g. the USSR or Al-Qaeda. That is more true today, and increasingly so tomorrow. While the department of defense is now focused on the 4+1 threat set, which expands our myopic focus from Islamic Extremists to legacy and emerging adversary states, it still misses the larger picture in my opinion. Instead of focusing on what type of force we need based on today's threats (that must be done, hear me out), we should have a think-tank like organization focus on what type of government we need to effectively advance and protect our interests in an increasingly globalized world. Once the larger picture is understood, we can focus on the type of security forces we need to mitigate threats to U.S. interests globally. I suspect part of that security force will look constabulary like (land forces with Coast Guard like law enforcement authorities), not to mention pulling our heads out of our butts when it comes to cyber.

Just a side comment to the cyber threat....the core problem with the US IT world right now is that utter believe the US is the greatest IT giant and others cannot match our abilities.

Right now I see daily nation state Russian, Iranian, Chinese hackers and their related IT crime gangs doing things that major US IT companies cannot even come close to doing...

Simply put we have been left standing still in the dust on that 21st century IT highway.....we urgently need to wake and smell literally the coffee before we become "the toast".....

As a cliché..."our IT ego experts are writing checks they cannot cash and they are trying to convince they can"....

[OUTLAW 09]

Finnish power companies targeted by hacking attempts. Specifically going after critical electrical distribution systems (!)
https://twitter.com/akihheikkinen/st...15290158759938 …

Russian cyber espionage in Finland, targeting media and @bellingcat:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/russian_cyber-...sanoma/8919118 …

[Bill Moore]

An interim report that came out in FEB 2016, titled,
"Thinking the Unthinkable: A New Imperative for Leadership in the Digital Age"

http://www.thinkunthinkable.org/

“The rate of change we are going through at the moment is comparable to what happens in wartime …yet we think we are at peace. The global pace of change is overcoming the capacity of national and international institutions”
Chris Donnelly,
Director, Institute for Statecraft

This report is directed at the top levels of executive management, whether in government or business. I think they overstated some arguments, but they're still very much relevant. The authors assert that the rate of change is faster than most are prepared to concede, or respond to. They argue it is imperative we overcome our bias towards conformity if we hope to adapt to the new world that is rapidly emerging. The authors are British, so that should help explain this statement:

We heard similar concerns from someone currently at the heart of policy making: “On major foreign policy issues such as Russia and Islamic State, we are working with a set of leaders in Whitehall, in the European Union, who have no adult experience of harm affecting the homeland”. The official added: “Our leadership is strategically fatigued. I’m talking about
politicians and most of the Whitehall village. And also much of British society. The Twitterati for sure. But the world is changing. The world may bring harm to you in ways you cannot imagine and ways you cannot manage. There is a resilience deficit, a lack of understanding of the scale of emerging threat”. This makes identifying ‘unthinkables’, then taking action to prevent or pre-empt them ever more problematic and unlikely.

This seems to be a prevalent line of thinking throughout Western Europe (much less so in Eastern Europe). Wish problems away until it is no longer possible to do so. This goes back at least as far Chamberlain's refusal to see the obvious and instead of countering seek to appease Hitler. The alternative was unthinkable, or as the authors argue, even when it wasn't unthinkable it was undesirable; therefore, people tend to ignore it and hope it goes away.

When leaders are blindsided, it is often due to their biased information sources, as explained here (think about Trump defeating the Republican establish and Brexit passing, both a surprise to the so-called experts).

“[In a] world where more and more people are connecting … [where there is] greater fragmentation, but you’re also seeing greater connectivity … leaders are not very good at actually interpreting the messages that are out there from people who are not connecting through formal institutional mechanisms”, one former senior international official admitted. But this is the new reality. “Technology and the new politics are changing the relationship between leaders and those they lead”, said Sir John Sawers, former head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in his first speech since leaving
Vauxhall Cross.

How this disrupts legacy forms of governance:

Governments will have to address super-complex issues such as mass
migration, climate change, population increase, rising urbanisation, ageing and the attendant huge resource questions. This is at a time when its legitimacy is being publically challenged.

Later in the report the authors state the ministers in Whitehall have relied on, and gotten away with, the tactics of delay and prevarication because they have worked. Of course those ministers have good company in the U.S. Congress and other countries.

Part 2 follows:

[Bill Moore]

I loved this quote:

“You cannot know any more as a leader. Therefore, your role as a leader has changed to becoming the one figuring out what the best way is to frame problems, what the most important questions are to be asked.”
Patricia Seemann, founder, the 3am Group

The level of knowledge between leaders and followers are often equal, and in some cases, especially technical, the follower will have more knowledge. The leaders role is to lead the group in framing the problem to enable the group to address it. Our as Patricia stated, to ask the right questions.

What must be regarded as the pre-2008 and pre-2014 ‘old think’ now has to be viewed as no longer fit for purpose and in large part redundant. Past beliefs and assumptions must be jettisoned. They need to be replaced by a pragmatic realisation that such old ways of thinking carry not just a high price but an even higher cost. “What you need to think about are the necessary structures and tools that the business must employ to try and minimize conformity and cognitive bias”, said a leading consultant.

In my view, we have creative people in the military, at least in the special operations world, but that creativity, that ability to think in ways that doesn't conform to engrained ways are thought, are difficult to act upon when our bureaucratic systems tend to oppose implementing ideas that do not fit into existing processes and the existing timelines (The situation on the ground could change 5 or more times, by the time a change is implemented. Thus, when it is implemented, it is no longer suited for the current situation).

In all of this there is one major hang up. Many leaders don’t feel comfortable believing in strategic thinking anyway.

In fact, many military leaders brag about not thinking strategically and just acting. They embrace tactics, the illusion of short term success, while losing strategically. They system rewards this behavior.

Short-termism is the inevitable reality both in the public and private sector. “Strategic thinking is something which doesn’t happen very often, even when people say that they take time out to do strategic thinking. In my experience, not a lot of that goes on. And without strategic thinking, and without some imagination, then it’s easy to understand why people don’t think the unthinkable, because they haven’t thought of all of the possibilities that could face them in the future”, as one former security specialist now in the corporate world told us.

Getting back to understanding the world we live in, I found the following comments of interest. This type of understanding may have led to different decisions in Vietnam and elsewhere.

An insight by Professor Ngaire Woods of Oxford University is especially intriguing. “If you want to get a sense of what kinds of social change are likely to happen in a country, or what the extremes might be, look to the film makers of that country. Look to the people who are documenting the experience of communities and people. My prime example would be of an Egyptian film – Heya Fawda? [Is This Chaos?]53 which was made several
years before the Arab Spring, and completely predicted [it] theme-by-theme.

“I'm not saying, ‘read any old film like the weather forecast’. But I’m just saying: look for who the social commentators in a society actually are. The artist, the filmmakers – whatever – are usually telling you about something that you’re not seeing through the eyes of government analysts and advisors and academics and social scientists and such like”.
These rather unexpected pointers are a sobering reality check of what is possible when it comes to spotting, then identifying both ‘unthinkables’ and ‘unpalatables’.

There is an imperative to change fundamentally organisational systems: “The way we are structured, organised, the way we share information, the way we process information, the way we reward people, the way we take risk and analyse risk. The way we organise what is up, what is strategic, what is not, what is tactical. Who has the right to do what, what type of control”, said one exceptional leader currently in the throes of a top-to-bottom refit of an organisation distinguished by its extraordinary complexity.

Part 3: What to do, next post

[Bill Moore]

Greater, urgent understanding of the extraordinary scale of transformation needed for contemporary organisations and the implications for their leadership is now essential.

I noted earlier that the authors may be overstating the speed of change. There was significant and rapid change in the world just prior to and after WWI, and of course after WWII. Then we settled into a Cold War, which created the illusion of time standing still, because we only focused on one strategic issue, our competition with the USSR. Today, everything is increasingly connected, so almost any change anywhere tends to ripple across borders and often has a global impact, so change may be more frequent and it may be happening faster. I'm not sure how you would measure that, but suffice to say, change is happening, and when change happens you adjust or face set backs relative to your competitors.

Step one in my view is identifying what interests we must protect, until we do that, it will impossible to identify what is truly strategic and must be addressed. Step two is to frame the problem accurately. We'll be unlikely to do that at first go, so as designers say, we have to reframe constantly, the only thing that will remain relatively static are those national interests we are hoping to protect or advance.

Therefore, your role as a leader has changed to becoming the one figuring out what the best way is to frame problems, what the most important questions are to be asked”.

Patricia Seemann agrees. “How the hell do you design a strategy in today’s world? You used to be able to do one for three or five years. You can’t anymore. You can set the general direction and then you try things out, and you constantly re-frame and re-frame etc.” She says that the ‘coping’ strategy involves “A huge amount of iterative experimentation”. As a result, she said: “The critical thing is to have an organization that can learn incredibly quickly, faster than its competitors. Now, the 1990's theme of ‘learning organisation’ is coming back with a vengeance”.

The paper ends with the following, which reminds me of McCrystal's "Team of Teams."

The imperative is to change fundamentally organisational systems. Capability can be achieved by linking together people, process, leadership, technology and culture in order to focus them on one thing, such as decision making. Engaging staff in decision-making requires the removal of obstacles to internal communications, and shattering cultural barriers that lead to conformity. It also means having direct access to the widest possible number of sensors and analysts, however unorthodox they might be. “The way we are structured, organised, the way we share information, the way we process information, the way we reward.

We're into the second decade of the 21st Century, and we are adapting, but it isn't clear if we're adapting quick enough, or even adapting correctly. Technology is important, but technology doesn't replace the necessity for strategic thinking. Perhaps strategy in the 21st Century will be less about ends, ways, and means, and more about understanding what our interests really are, what is happening the environment, and how we describe and evaluate risk. Strategy should facilitate mid and long term views, but more than ever our processes for acting must be increasing agile so we can act fast to capitalize on an opportunity based on our understanding and sensing the environment. These processes also need to allow us to rapidly divest and reinvest elsewhere based on our improved ability to learn and adapt.

[davidbfpo]

This little known and discreet "think tank" has some excellent members, two of them are good friends and I've met a couple of others. Chris Donnelly is a former USSR military expert, based at Sandhurst and then a Soviet Studies team - which IIRC was disbanded as a cost-cutting measure.

Their website:http://www.statecraft.org.uk/

[Bill Moore]

The October 2016 issue of the Joint Force Quarterly has some articles that shine some light on how our current Department of Defense leadership is looking at aspects of strategy for a 21st Century.

First, From the Chairman: Strategic Challenges and Implications

http://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Fo...-implications/

The Chairman identified 4 strategic implications:

1. The first one is foundational. We need a balanced inventory of joint capabilities that allow us to deter and defeat potential adversaries across the full range of military operations.

Not a new challenge, but it remains a significant challenge, more so tighter restrictions on the purse strings. The ability to wage non, unconventional, conventional, and nuclear warfare (I'm lumping cyber under non-conventional for now). While hybrid threats also are not new, it is still a useful concept for reacquainting the force with the totality of warfare. Before 9/11 is was conventional warfare centric, no need to worry about unconventional adversaries, after 9/11 the force swung in the other direction. Need to get after those terrorists, there will never be a conventional war again. We have started, and need to continue, to stop treating wars like Military Occupational Specialties (MOSs). One soldier specializes in conventional warfare, while another specializes in unconventional, and treat warfare more like liberal arts, than a technical trade school.

2. The second implication is the need for us to more effectively employ the military instrument of national power to address the challenges Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea present. Each of these nations, in different ways, fully leverages economic coercion, political influence, unconventional warfare, information operations, cyber operations, and military posture to advance their interests. This is competition with a military dimension that falls below the threshold that would trigger a traditional and decisive military response. And since these countries compete in ways that mute our response, they continue to advance their interests at the qualitative and quantitative expense of our own.

Back to the gray zone, a zone we compete in, but not as effectively as our adversaries.

3.

The third implication, and to me one of the most significant, is that we have a mandate to keep pace with the character of war in the 21st century.

Short discussion on multi-domain and rapid pace of change.

4.

Therefore, the fourth implication is the need for greater strategic integration in the future, both in our strategy development and in our decision making processes. The intent is to build a framework within which we can address these 4+1 challenges across the five operational domains with which we are dealing and the many associated functions.

This one worries me, because it is ahistorical and far being strategic as written. It continues to push the military-industrial-complex myth that if our technology enables us to dominate the 5 "recognized" domains, we will prevail strategically.

I did like the closing though:

What drives me, and what motivates our Joint Staff team, is the changing character of war. How do we get more agile? How do we frame decisions for our senior leadership in a more effective way? Just like every other endeavor in our profession, it begins with a common understanding of the threat, and a common appreciation for the capabilities and limitations of the Joint Force, and then a framework within which we could make real-time decisions that will most effectively employ that force.

[Bill Moore]

Other articles of interest in the OCT 16 JFQ

Fast Followers, Learning Machines, and the Third Offset Strategy

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. . . . This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.

—Isaac Asimov

A perfect quote to sag way into a discussion on strategy for the remainder of the 21st Century.

In 1993, Andrew Marshall, Director of Net Assessment, stated, “I project a day when our adversaries will have guided munitions parity with us and it will change the game.”2 On December 14, 2015, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work announced that day’s arrival when arguing for a Third Offset during comments at the Center for a New American Security.

The article gives a good run down on what the 3rd Off Set Strategy is all about (whether one agrees or disagrees with it logic). Unlike other articles I have seen, it also presented a list of risks associated with this strategy. One that I found compelling, but not compelling enough to stop the forward march of technology is:

A New Fog of War. Lastly, the advent of learning machines will give rise to a new fog of war emerging from uncertainty in a learning machine’s AI programming. It is a little unsettling that a branch of AI popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s was called “fuzzy logic,” due to an ability to alter its programming that represents a potential loss of control and weakening of liability.

The article ends with:

However, pursuit of game-changing technologies is only sustainable by breaking out of the increasingly exponential pace of technological competition with Fast Followers. A Third Offset Strategy could do this and could provide the first to adopt outsized advantages. Realistically, to achieve this requires integrating increasing layers of autonomy into legacy force structure as budgets align to new requirements and personnel adapt to increasing degrees of learning machine teaming. The additive effect of increasing autonomy could fundamentally change warfare and provide significant advantage to whoever successfully teams learning machines with manned systems. This is not a race we are necessarily predestined to win, but it is a race that has already begun with strategic implications for the United States.

The next article starts to address the missing link in the 3rd Off Set Strategy, which is how will we employ all these capabilities? The author makes a strong argument for leveraging wargaming.

Wargaming the Third Offset Strategy

It is not only technology but also how new capabilities are employed that produces military power.13 A new capability is more than just a new technology. It requires new concepts for employing the systems and training on how to operate them as part of a larger joint fight. The strategy is unlikely to reach its full potential until the joint community develops new operating concepts.

In conclusion:

Officers should take an active role and imagine future battlefields as part of their JPME experience and field exercises, learning to analyze the art and science of military practice. The joint community can work with the individual Services and integrate Third Offset wargames with JPME curriculum. Officers and the civilian academics who work in JPME should be incentivized to research and critique alternative operating concepts that emerge from the wargames.

Pursued along these lines, the net benefit of wargaming the Third Offset could well be to empower a new generation of military leaders to take ownership of intellectual development in the profession of arms.