The Warden Collection (merged thread)

[slapout9]

So there are situations when working back from a single scenario is not the best strategy to use. Since the reason you give is political, this reinforces the idea that its unrealistic to expect that you can always work in military-centric vacuum, disassociated from politics.

I think there are situations where we (US) try to solve political and economic situations by dumping it on the military instead of actually solving the real problem.

Not according to this article. It is all part of step 2WHAT

There is a bit more to the process than can be explained in a short article.

The process by which the model of the system you are trying to abstract through the 5 Rings process is defined is not directly addressed. Since this modeling of functions (the first stage in application of systems theory - you have to understand the system in detail before you can simplify it) it lead to one of the criticisms of Wardens process - that it tries to jump directly to "simple" without a real understanding of the "complex". The real world attempts to do this (SOSA or system of systems analysis) lead to things like the much maligned powerpoint diagram of systems interactions in Afghanistan. The treatment of systems as essentially static by SOSA analysts and the inability to "know what you don't know" about a system lead to much of Gen Mattis' criticism of EBO - which centered in large measure on difficulties implementing SOSA in an way that sufficiently informed decision-makers (I saw this first hand in several JEFX's).

I very much agree on that one. It is something that needs to be worked on. A better feedback loop in particular. To see how the system has adapted after an action has been taken against the system.

So you taser (tase?) somebody, and then they get up and get into the police car right? No the taser ENABLES you take him into custody. It doesn't convince him to get in the car, it just removes his ability to resist for a few minutes. If you don't exploit that opportunity, then he just gets up and runs away. In many ways we have military tasers. Our overwhelming superiority has "taken the fight" out of many potential adversaries, leading them to exploit non-military avenues to engage us. 9/11 taught us the a military is not required to attack us.

I don't agree, we have not taken the fight out of them. They are still fighting are they not?

The Air Force may be able to provide tasers, but as Warden admits, it only enable ground forces ability to take the perps into custody.

So what is wrong with that?

IF you use chess strategy and the adversary know you will, he will make the game Go and will win. You can of course just turn the juice up on the taser and kill the perp, but then you have to deal with the social consequences.

You will have to deal with social consequences no matter what you do. So the question is IMO which action will strengthen your system and weaken your enemy.?

Ahhh! not so fast - you just changes the boundary around the system! Another fundamental problem with Warden's use of systems theory. He arbitrarily places convenient boundaries around the "system". I was not trying to influence the broader population. If you don't understand the social as well as the physical network you could also push a large contingent into your adversary's camp by heavy handed "physical" action.

Once again, you can't just draw a boundary around the physical components of an adversary system and ignore the cognitive and social effects of "effecting" the physical parts.

1-I don't understand, nobody ever said you should ignore them, you just need to realize that you can't predict them. 2-Changing the boundaries is what the whole Strategy is about Warden has always said you want to start at the highest level possible largest system involved) and then work down to the individual target

Then he is arguing to fundamentally change the "American Way of War" which is that we employ military forces worldwide as the stick behind or diplomatic and economic carrots. It also begs the question of what constitutes a "threat to our survival"? Was WWII really a threat to OUR survival? WWI certainly wasn't. None of the wars since have been.

Pearl Harbor???

What if our survival is not threatened, but our position of economic leadership in the world? If China established a "Pacific NATO" that declared its goal to be not threatening our survival, but systematically degrading our economic might until there was a "level playing field" in their opinion and we no longer constituted a superpower? How do you utilize military force forward in the world, if your stated policy is not to use it unless your national survival is threatened. If an LCS that is inconveniently placed is sunk, what do you do? A Carrier Strike group? THe belligent says "go home and we have no beef with you". That is not a threat to your survival, but emasculates you on the world stage.

Our economic leadership is being threatened, no doubt in my book(China's finance man studies Abe Lincoln,which is why we will loose) but that is not a military problem.

If you are only going to war against existential threats why not just maintain a an ICBM force and tell the world, any country that threatens my existence goes away. You then don't need an Air Force.
I really don't think that is what Warden has in mind.

The poorer our country gets the more we may end up looking at this idea and no Warden wouldn't like it nor should anybody else for that matter, because you wouldn't need a Navy or an Army either.

Which doesn't answer the question of what is broken with the current system? And why it is better to assume the Air Force can do everything and rule things out, rather than look at the joint force as a whole, and decide which service is most effective and efficient at providing desired capabilities?

I don't know the answer to that, maybe Cliff or Entropy can shed some insight on that.

Nicky is smart, and understands the dangers of dividing the physical from the social and focusing on the wrong one:

http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince17.htm

Nice link, thanks