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Thread: The concept of "adaptation"

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    Default The concept of "adaptation"

    As an outsider looking in, I wonder if anyone would be able to point me to any papers, books, or other publications that analyze the concept of adaptation from a military perspective. I'm an evolutionary biologist, and my people have been talking, thinking, and getting confused about adaptation for nigh on 200 years. But have there been specific, detailed analyses of this concept in the military sphere? It's popular now to say that forces must be adaptable, that quick adaptation is needed in small wars, that insurgents adapt to counterinsurgents, etc.

    Since I'm coming from the academic side of the house, there may well be a three volume work by some nineteenth-century German on Theorie der militarisch Adaptation that everybody studies at the War College but that I don't know about; if so, I'd be glad to be educated.

    If there isn't such an analysis, I might be interested in writing one. (Not in three volumes, though.)

    Many thanks.

    Bob

    "Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775

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    Hi Bob,

    No idea if there is or not, I'll let others answer that one, although I suspect hat most of the use of the term comes via the management literature - a sort of watered down Spencerian version.

    Personally, I would really like to see your thoughts on it. I've been playing around with the Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium to try and get a handle on culture area modes of warfare. I also suspect that there could be some really good work done using Bill Calvin's concept of Darwinian Bootstrapping to explain the phenomenon.

    Marc
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    Default Military adaptation

    There is a reasonably substantial literature that focuses on what I would call ‘change in military organizations’.

    But a first question that needs to be asked is what do you mean by ‘adaptation’?

    I know, I know, a picky semantic question but important nonetheless. ‘Adaptation’ has many meanings in this literature, which does lend to a degree of confusion about what is being discussed/analyzed. ‘Innovation’ is the other widely used term that often lacks semantic clarity.

    To give you a starting point, some authors define ‘innovation’ (as in military innovation) as major change in the aims, strategies (ie warfighitng concepts) and/or structure of a military organization’. The emphasis here is on ‘major’. So, as an example, the adoption of the warfighting concept of maneuver warfare by the US Army and Marine Corps would be innovation in this schema.

    Adaptation would, in contrast, be minor changes or alterations that improve (or not, as the case may be) something that the military does but that does not have significant.major implications for aims, strategies and/or structure. Hence adaptation covers a wide range of adjustments that military organizations and military organizations constantly undertake. As some examples, developing new foot patrol techniques would be adaptation; equally, the Army’s FCS as it was originally conceived be would be adaptation - to my mind but I am still working on this - for ultimately while the FCS entails the wholesale rethinking of the character of the platforms the Army uses, it was still be to based on a ‘division’ structure, the new platforms would do pretty much what the old ones did, only differently, and it would be used for the much the same purpose as traditional heavy armour divisions were to be used (to fight a peer on a conventional battlefield). So adaptations can small or large.

    The foregoing is probably more confusing than enlightening (typically academic, then), but it does get at some of the distinctions. But the extant literature is substantial enough that even this somewhat rough and ready semantic nit-picking helps to distinguish what is of interest to you.

    Also, of course, are you interested in organizational adaptation (or adaptability) or individual adaptability?

    And if there is some 19th Century German military thinker who has dealt with this, I would be keen to know about him or her as well – though preferably with the reference to an English version. My Deutsche is pretty restricted to ordering a large beer, asking where the bathroom is and saying ‘thank you and ‘please’ …..

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    Quote Originally Posted by TT View Post
    There is a reasonably substantial literature that focuses on what I would call ‘change in military organizations’.

    But a first question that needs to be asked is what do you mean by ‘adaptation’?

    I know, I know, a picky semantic question but important nonetheless. ‘Adaptation’ has many meanings in this literature, which does lend to a degree of confusion about what is being discussed/analyzed. ‘Innovation’ is the other widely used term that often lacks semantic clarity.

    To give you a starting point, some authors define ‘innovation’ (as in military innovation) as major change in the aims, strategies (ie warfighitng concepts) and/or structure of a military organization’. The emphasis here is on ‘major’. So, as an example, the adoption of the warfighting concept of maneuver warfare by the US Army and Marine Corps would be innovation in this schema.

    Adaptation would, in contrast, be minor changes or alterations that improve (or not, as the case may be) something that the military does but that does not have significant.major implications for aims, strategies and/or structure. Hence adaptation covers a wide range of adjustments that military organizations and military organizations constantly undertake. As some examples, developing new foot patrol techniques would be adaptation; equally, the Army’s FCS as it was originally conceived be would be adaptation - to my mind but I am still working on this - for ultimately while the FCS entails the wholesale rethinking of the character of the platforms the Army uses, it was still be to based on a ‘division’ structure, the new platforms would do pretty much what the old ones did, only differently, and it would be used for the much the same purpose as traditional heavy armour divisions were to be used (to fight a peer on a conventional battlefield). So adaptations can small or large.

    The foregoing is probably more confusing than enlightening (typically academic, then), but it does get at some of the distinctions. But the extant literature is substantial enough that even this somewhat rough and ready semantic nit-picking helps to distinguish what is of interest to you.

    Also, of course, are you interested in organizational adaptation (or adaptability) or individual adaptability?

    And if there is some 19th Century German military thinker who has dealt with this, I would be keen to know about him or her as well – though preferably with the reference to an English version. My Deutsche is pretty restricted to ordering a large beer, asking where the bathroom is and saying ‘thank you and ‘please’ …..

    Good point. The U.S. military, at least, uses the concept of "transformation" rather than "adaptation." Nagl's work on militaries as "learning organizations" (as well as Sullivan's Hope Is Not a Method) might be useful.

    On the U.S. military's approach to transformation, Fred Kagan's Finding the Target is good. I published an essay entitled, ""America's Defense Transformation: A Conceptual and Political History" in Defence Studies last year. (I can send a .pdf if anyone wants it).
    Last edited by SteveMetz; 07-20-2007 at 11:50 AM.

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    Hi Steve,

    Quote Originally Posted by SteveMetz View Post
    On the U.S. military's approach to transformation, Fred Kagan's Finding the Target is good. I published an essay entitled, ""America's Defense Transformation: A Conceptual and Political History" in Defence Studies last year. (I can send a .pdf if anyone wants it).
    I'd like a copy of that one.
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Hi Steve,



    I'd like a copy of that one.
    So send my your email already.

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    Default Suggested Readings

    I would also suggest going to the Combat Studies Institute and CGSC Press page

    There are a number of books and papers that speak to adaptation, transformation, and learning. For starters look at:

    Leavenworth Paper (LP) No. 1: The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76, Major Robert A. Doughty. (HTML) (PDF)

    LP No. 4: The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During The First World War, Timothy T. Lupfer. (HTML) (PDF)

    LP No. 12: Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II, Dr. Christopher R. Gabel. (PDF)

    LP No. 16: Deciding What Has To Be Done: General William E. Depuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations, Major Paul H. Herbert. (HTML) (PDF)

    Research Survey (RS) No. 5: Standing Fast. German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front During World War II: Prewar to March 1943, Major Timothy A. Wray. (HTML) (PDF)

    RS No. 6: A Historical Perspective on Light Infantry, Major Scott R. McMichael. (PDF)

    CSI Report (CSIR) No. 1: The Evolution of the Tank in the US Army, 1919-1940, LTC Kenneth M. Steadman. (HTML)

    CSIR No. 8: Discussions on Training and Employing Light Infantry, MAJ Scott R. McMichael. (HTML) (PDF)

    CSIR No. 14: Sixty Years of Reorganizing for Combat: A Historical Trend Analysis, CSI Faculty. (HTML) (PDF)

    Secret of Future Victories, Paul F. Gorman, General, U.S. Army, Retired. (HTML)

    Watershed at Leavenworth- Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Command and General Staff College, MAJ Mark C. Bender. (HTML)

    In Tribute to General William E. DePuy, Generals Thurman, Talbott, & Gorman. (HTML) (PDF)

    Center for Military History U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941.

    Understanding the "victory disease" from the Little Bighorn to Mogadishu and beyond, Timothy Karcher. Paper #3. (PDF)

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    Default Reading list

    RJO,

    Tom has given you an excellent list of works. I can offer more but it would be helpful if I had an idea of what is of most interest to you. The literature is fairly extensive (as Tom's list makes evident) and some of it is very focused on particular aspects of change in military organizations (ie, a number of works on the role of organizational culture in military change, among other aspects). Some of it is historical, some is what might be termed 'analytical narratives' (they analyse a particular case, past and near present) and some of it is theoretical (or somewhat so). So the problem I have (looking around my office) is where to start.

    TT

    PS. Steve is quite right that the current buzz term for the US military is 'Transformation' but I did not want to go there.

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    Default Some more....

    It is a dreary day and I am stuck gutting an index as the publisher informed me that having a user friendly, helpful index is not acceptable. Not fun (sigh).

    To add to Toms list, some of the central academic works are:

    [Health Warning: you are now entering the realm of academic dispute]


    Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell, 1984) Neorealist explanation of interwar period

    Steven Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War (Cornell, 1991)

    Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (ie Malaysia and Vietnam) (Cornell, 1994)

    (these are on opposite sides of the question of whether mil orgs require civilian intervention to change or will change on their own).

    Organizational Culture

    (these include culture as organizational structure – promotion pathways, hierarchy and so on – or as self identity).

    Jack Snyder, Ideology of the Offensive (Cornell, 1984) – lead up to WWI

    Kimberly Marten Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation, 1955-1991 (Princeton 1993)

    Peter J. Katzenstein, Culture Norms and National Security (Cornell, 1996)

    Elizabeth Keir, Imagining War (Princeton, 1997) Interwar period

    Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, 2005)

    (Second health warning: the foregoing are theoretical or theoretical leaning, except Rosen’s book)



    Adaptation/Learning (mainly at tactical level)

    Michael Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944-45 (Uni of Kansas Press, 1994)

    James Jay Carafano, GI Ingenuity: Improvisation, technology and Winning WWII (Praeger 2006).

    (these two are analytical narratives)


    Beware, there are other books, and there are many articles as well (including articles that are drawn from the books above).



    And not to neglect History (well, more or less history)…..

    Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, ed, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge 1996)

    Harold R. Winton and David r. Mets, eds, The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918-1941 (Uni of Nebraska Press, 2000)

    David E. Johnson, Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the US Army, 1917-1945 (Cornell, 1998)

    Victor David Hanson: Why the West has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (Faber & Faber, 2001)

    And the counter arguments to Hanson:

    John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Westview 2003)

    J.E. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in classical Antiquity (Yale 2005)

    (poli types are not the only ones who engage in internecine fights)


    PS. Yes, the interwar period has been flogged to death and then flogged yet again, and then again - and no doubt it will be flogged even further in future.

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    I thank you all indeed for these excellent ideas and references. It's just what I was looking for, and I can see it could keep me busy for a long time.

    One of the difficulties (and so one of the greatest delights) when jumping from a familiar field into an unfamiliar one is learning to line up your old vocabulary and conceptual world with the vocabulary and conceptual world of the new territory -- like being dropped onto the far side of a mountain range that you know, but one that you have to study for a while to figure out where you now are in relation to where you were before.

    "Adaptation" as a keyword in evolutionary biology has been subject to technical debate for generations. It can refer to a state-of-being (fitted to one's environment) as well as to a process of change (the process of becoming fitted to one's environment). As an historical aside: "adaptation" as a state-of-being had been observed by naturalists from time immemorial, and the apparent fit of organisms to their environments was classically seen as evidence for a Designer (God) who created the fit, since it couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. (In philosophy this is called "the argument [for the existence of God] from design"). The historical reason that Darwin's Origin of Species was so important was that it provided a third alternative: "adaptation" was understood to be the result neither of (a) chance, nor (b) design, but (c) natural selection, the process that adapts populations of organisms to their environments over generational time.

    So, coming back to our comparative disciplinary context, I guess there are two items I may want to explore further. First is the essential local-ness of adaptation. This is a basic idea from evolutionary biology: natural selection doesn't result in adaptation-in-general, but rather in adaptation to the immediate conditions right where you are. Whether a change is adaptive depends entirely on the local environment, and something that is adaptive at one moment may not be at the next if the environment changes out from under you.

    A second item I may explore further concerns that conditions that promote adaptation. Darwin described a variety of general characteristics of populations that permit selection to work more effectively and rapidly. These can be extended to various other non-biological learning/adapting processes, and this I think might be a useful exercise. The practical bottom line would be something like, "Advice from Darwin: Ten ways to make your organization more adaptive."

    Thanks again for all the excellent references.

    Bob

    "Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775

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    Hi Bob,

    On our first point, there is the problem of replication units within the organization. I think Calvin probably has the best form (Darwin's was truly lousy - gremmules indeed!).

    1. There must be a pattern involved.
    2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit -- so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]
    3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance -- though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.
    4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we're now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.
    5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That's Darwin's natural selection.
    6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This is what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).
    So, what are the patterns and replication units? I think a good case could be made that in a military organization, one way of defining the replication units would be TTPs (Tactics, Techniques & Procedures) as the pattern, while you would have to define the workspace as training time and operational deployment (two different environments). Certainly there is a big fight going on inside the US military right now about COIN training vs. "real war" training .

    You would also have to define the organism boundary - and that will be a nightmare given how personelle float back and forth between them. You will probably end up having to define it at the unit level.

    Quote Originally Posted by RJO View Post
    A second item I may explore further concerns that conditions that promote adaptation. Darwin described a variety of general characteristics of populations that permit selection to work more effectively and rapidly. These can be extended to various other non-biological learning/adapting processes, and this I think might be a useful exercise. The practical bottom line would be something like, "Advice from Darwin: Ten ways to make your organization more adaptive."
    A good idea, Bob. I'll look forward to seeing it .

    Marc
    Last edited by marct; 07-21-2007 at 04:13 PM. Reason: half the post got lost!
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    Default Evolutionary Biology and Military Change

    Bob,

    Ah, I see said the visually impaired person as they looked through the knot hole in the barbed wire fence….

    No, seriously, I do comprehend your thinking. Certainly there are at least some broad correlations between ‘evolution’ and what is in the literature on military change. To abuse your metaphor somewhat, you might find a rough sketch of the skyline of that mountain range you refer to useful, in as much it may help you to navigate your way through the literature. I emailed a brief ‘sketch’ to you, though, as my ramblings are somewhat long and boring.

    The devil will be, as always, in the detail.



    PS I find that sometime my messages sometimes get bounced back (possibly because I have degenerated from a computer geek to a computer klutz). So let me know if do you not receive it shortly.

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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    On our first point, there is the problem of replication units within the organization.... So, what are the patterns and replication units? I think a good case could be made that in a military organization, one way of defining the replication units would be TTPs (Tactics, Techniques & Procedures).... You would also have to define the organism boundary - and that will be a nightmare given how personnel float back and forth between them. You will probably end up having to define it at the unit level.
    Yes, if one wanted to develop notions of "cultural evolution" these would be things that would have to be addressed -- replicators, unit individuals, etc. But with respect to features that promote adaptability, one can black-box the question of replicators and say, whatever form they may take, here are the systemic traits needed to promote their ability to adapt. I think there may be some clear sailing along that line of thought (famous last words...).

    Bob

    "Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775

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    Quote Originally Posted by TT View Post
    No, seriously, I do comprehend your thinking. Certainly there are at least some broad correlations between ‘evolution’ and what is in the literature on military change. ... I emailed a brief ‘sketch’ to you...

    PS I find that sometime my messages sometimes get bounced back (possibly because I have degenerated from a computer geek to a computer klutz). So let me know if do you not receive it shortly.
    The message did come through to my personal email but didn't get stored here on SWJ for some reason, but it was very helpful and I thank you indeed. It does give me a better feel for the landscape and a sense that I might be able to map a bit of territory that hasn't been looked at yet with respect to adaptability (how to create a "learning culture" in an evolutionary sense).

    RJO

    "Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775

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    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Bob,

    Quote Originally Posted by RJO View Post
    Yes, if one wanted to develop notions of "cultural evolution" these would be things that would have to be addressed -- replicators, unit individuals, etc. But with respect to features that promote adaptability, one can black-box the question of replicators and say, whatever form they may take, here are the systemic traits needed to promote their ability to adapt. I think there may be some clear sailing along that line of thought (famous last words...).
    LOLOL. I agree that it does look promising but, once you actually look at it, it still fails. BTW, that type of approach was taken in a lot of the management literature in the 1980's 1990's. The problem with it is that it assumes a teleological basis and proscriptive form. In effect, it isn't about adaptation so much as it is about a specific form of cultural engineering at the system level.

    Actually, it is possible to define replication units (and systems) without going into individual details. That was the approach taken by the memetics crowd who defined the replication unit as a meme or "idea/perception" (not quite right, but close enough). Another way it could be defined is by environmental testing sequence, i.e. how does the organization process information from its environment. That sidesteps the individual unit of perception and looks at he development of perception systems instead - think of it as a parallel to the evolution of sensory systems in organisms.

    There are other indicators that could be used as well, but you do have to have some type of unit, otherwise you have nothing to measure and you are back to prosciptive cultural engineering (aka Cultural Eugenics).

    Marc
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    Council Member Rob Thornton's Avatar
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    Default Change and War

    We were discussing change today and I though about this thread and something the former CSA said about change to the effect of its easier during war. Up to this point I really thought he meant that it was easier to rationalize increased spending, but now I wonder if that was really what he meant.

    On a couple of other threads we've discussed adaptation and change and we scrutinized how we'd done. I thought for a organization as large as we are, as layered as we are by echelon and as conservative as we are by nature and charter (preserve/protect/defend the U.S. culture) we've done pretty good.

    But today I wondered why. Some of the questions I though I'd pitch are:

    Is there a correlation between ease (meaning mentally or culturally accepting ) of change and how long a war lasts?

    Do we innovate and justify as we find out what works and does not? Maybe that is why the most effective change seems to be bottom up and more of a gradual evolution?

    How long is does this continue to occur after the war ends and we become more resistant to change (where an organization becomes stable and change resistant?)

    How does this impact our ability to inculcate the required changes to remain successful, while not abandoning the ability to recognize new requirements?

    Best regards, Rob

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    Default Good questions Pt 1

    Rob,

    Some very good questions.

    As a passing view, I would have thought that what your former CSA was referring to was, to be very crude, that being shot at provides much, much more incentive for trying and accepting change than is the case during peacetime. The crucible of combat exposes weaknesses and problems very quickly, as you and many other know very well, and your questions suggest you have already figured out. The issue of ‘increased spending’ does apply, however, with respect to technology, as there would be greater tolerance of risk of failed efforts or of funding multiple reserach approaches simultaneously.

    (hmm, sorry, I read a post on 'blue quotes' but I appear not to have succeed - my fingers appear to be dyslexic )

    Q1 'Is there a correlation between ease (meaning mentally or culturally accepting ) of change and how long a war lasts?'

    I am not aware of any studies that have sought to correlate length of war vs an increased ease of adaptation. Intuitively one would think that the longer the war the more willing a military would be to try new things that would contribute to ending the war sooner rather than later (the use of two atomic weapons ‘may’ be analogy for this) – with such willingness being more pronounced if one were losing. As a very rough comparison that broadly supports this intuition one might compare the amount of adaptation (minor change) and innovation (major change) in either WWI or WWII and the three week US assault to Baghdad.

    Nonetheless, I would think it would be situation specific, with a host of different variables at work (political culture, military culture, success or lack of success on the battlefield, leadership, political will to win, science and other intellectual capital, etc and so on). As a rough example of a military that did not learn, the Roman legions even after their resounding defeat by Arminius and his ‘German barbarians’ at Teutoberger Wald, seemed never to be able to adjust to this ‘new’ form of war and held to their form of war that had been exposed as wanting. This is, however, hardly a perfect example, for it is only one battle however very consequential it was, for the Romans only subsequently engaged pretty much in small and large forays across the Rhine as punishing acts, with lesser or greater military success.

    In the past 5-7 years a number of academics have started to focus on the question of how and why militaries learn, including on the battlefield. If you are interested, one very recent book that looks at learning and adaptation by American soldiers in the European theatre in WWII is James Jay Carafano’s ‘GI Ingenuity’ (2006)

    Q2 'Do we innovate and justify as we find out what works and does not? Maybe that is why the most effective change seems to be bottom up and more of a gradual evolution?'

    If you mean in war, trial and error is evident in the historical record. In WWI the Brits tried several different methods to break the jam at the Central Front (none worked very well) while the Germans, as everyone here knows, developed infiltration tactics which were refined through the trial and error of actually employing these tactics. One can find other examples of trial and error (as a Canadian I am obliged to mention the disastrous Dieppe raid that was a trial for the eventual Normandy landings). Such a trial and error approach is natural as the enemy always has a vote and will expose flaws in the original conception.

    The second part of your question is a bit trickier. Studies of major change in military organization suggest that, in peacetime, change most often occurs because of civilian intervention to force change, or due to the presence of a visionary military officer (or more than one) – the process is of course more complicated but the point is that the process is top-down. The only example of a bottom-up driven change in peacetime I can immediately think of that was is the introduction of maneuver warfare in the Marine Corps, though the ultimate success of this process depended on one of the advocates being appointed as Commandant (Gen. Gray). I say the ‘only’ knowing full well there are any number of academics would disagree, that there are lot of examples and point to particular weapon platforms/technologies – but this is an academic dispute.

    During a war, again one intuitively would think that change is more likely to be a bottom-up process, for those who are at or near the face of battle have a much greater understanding for the need for change than those who are sitting well away from the tactical and operational level of war. I am tempted, albeit a bit hesitant, to suggest the development new the new approach to COIN by the US is a good case of a bottom-up approach in wartime. I am thinking here of the Army putting out a new COIN manual in the autumn of 2004 that was very widely criticized, especially, as I understand it, by those who had been in the field, and the subsequent development of FM3-24 that was led by Gens Petreaus and Mattis, both of whom had been at or very near the coal face. Putting on my academic’s hat (err, no, forget that, I cannot even fathom those mortar board hats that academics wear with those gowns, never mind want to wear one), this has all the appearances of a major change driven essentially from the bottom up.

    By the same token, many of the adaptations undertaken at the war front are mostly tactical in nature and do not always trickle up. Or indeed may not even trickle out horizontally. On the other hand, the development, refinement and use of new adaptations, whether in technology or tactics, can spread across a military and the general accumulation of many such minor, incremental changes can lead to much broader and larger change as the military seeks to embed these many minor adaptations and make wider changes to account for their knock-on effects. And of course an adaptation on the battlefield can over time have an enormous effect – the bolting of armour plate onto trucks led to armoured personal carriers and all that changes that occurred to take advantage of these ‘new’ platforms.

    To be continued.....

  18. #18
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    Default Pt 2 This is getting too long.....

    Q3 'How long is does this continue to occur after the war ends and we become more resistant to change (where an organization becomes stable and change resistant?)'

    Part of ‘an’ answer to this I addressed above. The process will continue after the war, but most likely only in terms of making the many adjustments needed to fully integrate what was learned and successfully applied during the war (and deemed of continuing benefit). Equally, the historical record is replete with militaries undertaking major change after a having a lost a war to an opponent using different forms of warfare, or better tech, as they seek to redress their weaknesses and failures. I am not aware, however, of any studies that look at how long the period of such post war adaptation continues, for most studies examine why militaries change or why they do not (particularly when circumstances strongly suggest they should change). So the issue of how long this process may continue is just not something that is really examined for; this is reflected in the fact most studies do not really examine the detailed implementation of changes, rather focus on the circumstances and factors that influence the introduction and acceptance of a particular change.

    Q4 'How does this impact our ability to inculcate the required changes to remain successful, while not abandoning the ability to recognize new requirements?'

    This is an excellent question but I one I do not have a good answer to. My strong sense is that, at the end of the day, the willingness and capability to adapt in wartime has little real impact on whether a military will remain very innovative in preparing for some uncertain future. The is more than a grain of truth in the old saw that generals prepare to last war, or the last battle of the last war. Militaries are innately conservative, or, rather, cautious. If they undertake a ‘jump into the future’ there is risk that the change undertaken could be maladapted to the actual conditions they confront there, there may well be potentially disastrous consequences for them and the nation they serve. Being cautious, they revert to instrumentalism as a less risky approach (there are other reasons, such as military culture, political culture, and so on, that can strongly impact on this propensity as well). This tendency, it seems to me, is likely to be more pronounced when a military has been successful in the war just concluded.

    This said, now to turn to the first part of your question. I am going to be bold and presume that you are thinking about how we inculcate the lessons and adaptations with respect to COIN and even irregular warfare. In very broad terms, I have argued elsewhere that what is required is a new ‘narrative’, ‘behaviour’ and demonstrated ‘benefit’, particularly if military organizational culture needs to be adjusted to ensure change takes place. And it usually does. You change behaviour through by altering education and training, you alter promotional pathways, and so on and so forth. The US military is changing education, training, etc. The hard question is whether these changes in the US military are merely a function of the expedience of needing to prepare personnel before deployment, due to the wars they are engaged in, or whether the change in behaviour is aimed to change the US military more permanently, or will have that consequence. My suspicion from I what have read, seen and been told is that the lean is toward ‘expediency’, as the changes are not as far ranging and as deep as I would think they would need to be to effect more permanent change.

    And this points to changing the narrative, by which I mean that the military needs to change how it 'sees itself' and 'what it does'. Put another way, it needs to redefine its ‘self-identity’. To use the example of the US Army, its narrative is (or was) that it is, to keep it very simple, an armoured force (who we are) that fought wars against other like militaries (what we do). This 'narrative' is not so simple by any means, for it is composed of the entire history of the US Army, and more particularly about how the US Army has and does perceive, interpret and articulate this history (and here is where myths and legends creep in). To return to the US Army, this idea of what its narrative will be is bound up in the debates about whether COIN/IW is the future or whether it is conventional, classical state-vs-state warfare (ie the threat posed by China).

    Demonstrating benefit is fairly straightforward – benefit on the battlefield through to benefit, at a more personal level, of, say, gaining promotion because of excellence in the practice of these new methods (as a very narrow example, it has been discussed elsewhere on these board, I believe, the problem of MiTT personnel and whether they are rewarded for this duty).

    My view is that all three need to be achieved. Easy to say, much, much,much harder to do.

    To come to one of the more specific points of your question, inculcating the new while retaining the capacity to ‘recognize new requirements’, my view would be that as part of the above process you need to inculcate or foster a mindset of innovation and adaptation, as well as a broad mindset that is forward leaning in outlook. I am of course leaving aside the capacity to analyze for new requirements, though I would think that this would be linked. Again, easy to say……

    I apologize, Rob, for having twisted one or two of your questions abit. I also apologize, profusely, to one and all for going on and on, and then on some more.

    Sad to say but one of the things they do not tell you when you start your doctoral studies is that when they hand you that particular sheepskin (all I got was a piece of paper - ) several big, burly guys grab you, hold you down and inject you with several serums that seem to make you genetically long winded and pedantic……

    Best

    TT

  19. #19
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    Default Part I

    Hi Folks,

    Rob, some really god questions; TT some excellent answers (BTW, hat serum we got injected with also seems to shift language use as well ).

    Roundabout into:

    For a number of years, I have been trying to model the emergent properties of what we general call "culture" and its relationship to "society" and "macrosocial reality". Early on, I got hooked on the idea that if you can't ground your observations via a chain of causation back into biological reality, then you don't have a theory (you have a theology). Luckily, the version I subscribe to is "weak" in the sense that I hold that culture emerges from biological reality but is not determined by biological reality. Think of it as we all have to eat, but what we eat can be highly variant (i.e. non-deterministic as long as it meets certain minimal requirements).

    This led me to look at just how we (Anthropologists and social scientists in general) apply the concepts from evolutionary theory in our work. What struck me was that most of us do it so poorly and fall into the teleological trap that grabbed Spencer (i.e. that we are evolving towards something). A lot of this seemed to cme from the use of certain terms, e.g. "adaptation", "evolution", "survival of the fittest" (another invention by Spencer), that were applied in ways that Darwin never intended.

    I we go back to Darwin's original meanings, we end up with some interesting conditions that, I think, may help set the grounds to answer Rob's questions. BTW, I am using a set of conditions outlined by William Calvin in a paper called The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality (Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 1 available here or here).

    1. There must be a pattern involved.
    2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern). [Together, 1 and 2 are the minimum replicable unit - so, in a sense, we could reduce six essentials to five. But I'm splitting rather than lumping here because so many "sparse Darwinian" processes exhibit a pattern without replication.]
    3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance - though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result. Superpositions and recombinations will also suffice.
    4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space. For example, bluegrass and crab grass compete for back yards. Limited means the workspace forces choices, unlike a wide-open niche with enough resources for all to survive. Observe that we're now talking about populations of a pattern, not one at a time.
    5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another. That's Darwin's natural selection.
    6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns. In biology, there is a skewed survival to reproductive maturity (environmental selection is mostly juvenile mortality) or a skewed distribution of those adults who successfully mate (sexual selection). This what Darwin later called an inheritance principle. Variations are not just random jumps from some standard starting position; rather, they are usually little sidesteps from a pretty-good solution (most variants are worse than a parent, but a few may be even better, and become the preferred source of further variants).
    Okay, so within these conditions we have some terms that need to be puled out:

    Pattern: let's leave this for the moment since it could be any type of information pattern. If we were talking tactics, we could use TTPs.

    Replication: think education, training, stories / rumours about how to get promoted, etc.

    Workspace: just another way of saying "environment", but a useful word shift since the term "environment" has more and more come to mean the physical environment solely.

    Variation: new versions of a pattern. This is what biologists would call a "mutation" or, in some cases, an "exaptation" (it means taking something that evolved for one purpose and applying it to a completely different situation). In the case of a "mutation" it may be "simple" in the sense of just modifying one or two interactions (e.g. patrolling using a random walk rather than a pre-planned route every time) or it may be "complex" (e.g. leaving FOBs and living in the communities - think of this type as an "innovation").

    "Success": ideally, this refers to one of two things; a) success at individual survival (individual level) and b) success at replicating itself (population level). This is sometimes called a "measure of fitness".

    Adaptation actually refers to the combination of two of these - variation and success. In effect, "adaptation" is both the generation of "new patterns" and to competition of those variations within an environment.

    part 2 ...
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

  20. #20
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    Default Part II

    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
    Is there a correlation between ease (meaning mentally or culturally accepting) of change and how long a war lasts?
    I would have to say "no" on the whole since what seems to happen is that the workspaces ("environments") tend to generate successful adaptations within them in fairly short order (say 5-10 years). What does seem to happen is that you will develop an isomorphic vector along certain lines of variant selection.... think of that as the competition to be "the biggest and the best at X".

    On the other hand, that only holds if you are dealing with a stable environment - shift the environmental factors and you will see another flurry of adaptive changes. this is what SJ Gould calls "punctuated equilibrium" and there is some indication from the neo-institutionalist literature that it holds up in organizations.

    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
    Do we innovate and justify as we find out what works and does not? Maybe that is why the most effective change seems to be bottom up and more of a gradual evolution?
    "Success" is always tricky to measure, and this is probably most apparent in organizations like the military in a democratic society. For example, there are three major environments that the military has to adapt to: the battlespace (broadly conceived), the bureaucracy required for a large organization, and the civilian political environment. What "works best"in one probably does not "work best" in the others, so there is a constant toing and froing between models.

    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
    How long is does this continue to occur after the war ends and we become more resistant to change (where an organization becomes stable and change resistant?)
    Basically, what happens is that the relative weighting of the importance of the three environments I mentioned earlier changes. This shifts the primary basis of selection from the battlespace and civilian political environment in wartime to the bureaucracy and civilian political environment in peacetime. Innovation and change are encouraged in the battlespace environment (individual level of survival), while they are discouraged in the bureaucracy (replication; population level of survival). The bureaucracy is the interface between the battlespace and the civilian political environment (which is probably one of the reasons they are clamping down on military bloggers - but that's another thread).

    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Thornton View Post
    How does this impact our ability to inculcate the required changes to remain successful, while not abandoning the ability to recognize new requirements?
    This is really tricky. "Adaptation" is, in general, a result of the production and replication of variant patterns while replication at the population level (think training) is the result of selecting individual variants rather than groups. Think of it like this; you have a large variety of possible patterns that can be replicated. Some of them are discarded ("selected against") by the civilian political environment (e.g. torture, indiscriminate carpet bombing, nuking Iraq, etc.). These types of possible patterns are basically considered as "toxic mutations" - they don't (generally, there are exceptions) live long enough to replicate inside the population.

    Then we have a group of patterns that, in a hot war, are selected for in the battlespace - i.e. they promote individual survival. Some of these will "die" (i.e. be classed as toxic mutations) while others will work their way back into the bureaucratic environment for possible selection for replication in training or new FM's etc. Sometimes, you will see multiple centres of variation showing up in the battlespace - the convention vs. COIN is an excellent example of this. This may lead to a situation were population level selection (i.e. training and doctrine) are, de facto, selected by the civilian political environment - the new COIN manual is one case, Lincoln's firing loosing generals is another. The responsibility for implementing the population level selection is still in the hands of the bureaucracy.

    Now we come to the second part of your question "the ability to recognize new requirements". This is really tricky. Under he current model where most variations are produced in the battlespace, the only way to do so is to be continuously at war - which is sort of self defeating on the whole. One way the Romans solved that problem was by grabbing a whole bunch of task areas that we would consider "civilian" or, at least, "non-military" (e.g. infrastructure construction). The move to create a Corps of Advisers is a move in this direction.

    Another way to do to is to create a counter balance to the bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to act as if they were a permanent Red Team and who have the political authority to control the careers of bureaucrats, including firing them. Strangely enough, that was the role played by a number of priests in the various armies of the 16th and 17th centuries (usually done very badly). It was also the role played by the priesthood of Anubis in ancient Egypt - they could tell Pharoah (at least in the early and middle kingdoms) when he would die. This option isn't used much in industrial societies for a number of reasons.

    Another option, similar to this, is to develop a group operating in the civilian political environment that has both civilian and military people who act as a Red Team watch dog. Again, they have to have some power / authority, but the influence would be on the political leadership rather than on the bureaucracy. Tricky.

    Anyway, I've run on far too long so I'll leave it there.

    Marc
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

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