Strategy in the 21st Century

[Bill Moore]

An interesting article on competitive mobilization in preparation for a great power war, but does it hit the mark?

http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/com...against-china/

Competitive Mobilization: How Would We Fare Against China?

Defining mobilization
Mobilization entails the substantial and exceptional displacement, through either government conscription or bidding, of a country’s labor and productive capacity that would otherwise naturally go to civilian purposes.

Referencing another article, he quotes:

Their stimulating essay identified six gaps — munitions, weapons platforms, manpower, planning, technology, and stamina — that a big war against a peer competitor could reveal.

Is the legacy assumption still valid?

Manpower and production mobilization are likely to provide a competitive advantage for one side during a conflict

He argues that the side (comparing the U.S. to China) that can mobilize forces/power for the air and space domains will have the competitive advantage. He also points out that if policy denies kinetic attacks against China and we engage in a military force versus military force war that attrition will play a greater role, resulting in the growing importance of mobilization.

He ends with this:

Mobilization is a competition. But dominating a mobilization competition is not enough. A player still needs a complete strategy with a sound theory of success and operational concept in order to succeed.

Finally, decision-makers should incorporate mobilization into their overall concepts for deterrence. This will mean communicating competitive strategies for mobilization both to internal audiences and to allies and adversaries. Mobilization plans aren’t just for war — they should be a component of peacetime competitive strategies.

Overall a good article that is effectively argued, and probably does a flaw in our strategy if national leaders have failed to develop meaningful and realistic plans for mobilization. People is one thing, I suspect that despite the political liabilities associated with that, it will be worked out.

However, with the impact of globalization resulting in massive outsourcing of our manufacturing, or the inability to compete in basic areas such as the steel industry in a global market, does the U.S. have a sufficient infrastructure to quickly produce arms, ships, war planes (especially based on today's technical requirements)?

The author focused on the air and space domains, but what about the cyber domain? Do we have effective operational concepts for fighting in this domain? What does that mean? Would we have to rapidly recruit geek battalions or contract out an organization like Anonymous (which is multinational and reportedly mostly composed of French)? What if great powers leverage the human domain, like Russia did in the Ukraine, and Iran in Yemen? What does mobilization mean in that context? What does it mean beyond the military? USAID? State Department? etc.

Mobilization must be tailored to the conflict at hand or the projected conflict, and future wars will probably look increasingly different with more drones and other robotics playing a more predominant role. SOF, cyber, and other elements will most likely play increasingly important roles, but they will be employed differently than they are now.

[Bill Moore]

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

increasingly at odds with traditional government thinking and organizations. He states this “more than just disturbing—it’s terrifying.”

He makes the following arguments:

1.

Complex issues cannot be looked at as discrete pieces. Everything is interconnected—and interdependent—and there are ever fewer issues solely in the portfolio of a single department or agency. Consequently, the traditional government organizational constructs—ossified and stove-piped hierarchies—simply don’t work as they impede the ability to form the necessarily holistic perspectives and approaches.

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.

2. Complexity defies the desire for clear and identifiable cause-and-effect dynamics.

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.

3. Complex situations are very prone to emergent macro-behaviors—cascades, bubbles and crashes, etc.—that are discontinuous and can abruptly deviate from past patterns.

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

4. Increasing complexity means that already-extreme volatility is only going to get worse.

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.

[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/