In illo tempore...

[marct]

Hi Ron,

Wilf, do they really say that war is more complex now or is the message and point rather that those complexities must be understood and dealt by lower ranks then ever and under much faster shifting of circumstances?

I've been hearing that line a lot, but I really think it's a proxy for "there's just too much stuff we don't understand" rather than any actual change in the objective "complexity".

[Ron Humphrey]

Hi Ron,



I've been hearing that line a lot, but I really think it's a proxy for "there's just too much stuff we don't understand" rather than any actual change in the objective "complexity".

Would it be a beneficial exercise if we were to use an example something like the thread Mike F had but with perhaps a non military problem and help differentiate between complexity both objective and subjectiveLink

then try to tease out why and how it differs
from actor to actor.

[marct]

Hi Ron,

Would it be a beneficial exercise if we were to use an example something like the thread Mike F had but with perhaps a non military problem and help differentiate between complexity both objective and subjectiveLink

then try to tease out why and how it differs
from actor to actor.

Might indeed be a good idea..... Hmmm, if you've got one in mind, why don't you go ahead and start it? Right now, I'm still trying to pull my perceptions on the entire process together, which means that a lot of my "thinking" is pretty incomprehensible on the subject .

Let me give you a vignette of where my thinking is running (well, limping slowly...).

I was watching the "new" case study video at TRADOC, and one of the scenes showed the commander of a reaction force up on a hill observing the operations of a police check point. The facilitators (who were great BTW), noted that some 300 civilians were leaving the objective. My immediate reaction was to think to myself "Oh, crap, there's an ambush coming...". No one else really seemed to think it or, if they did, they didn't say anything.

Latter on, I was asking myself why I had that thought, and it popped into my head that it was because all of what I "know" about war comes from reading and talking with people who have actually fought. Civilians fleeing an area in advance of combat is such a classic trope in the literature, that it had become ingrained as a sign in my mind (a "clue" in the Piercian sense) with a very high probability that the civilians knew an ambush was coming and were fleeing the area. Why couldn't the commander see this (and, BTW, he didn't - he got caught badly)?

Bringing it back, does this mean that our experiences condition our perceptions? personally, I would say yes, but in more ways than we would like to think.

One of the key tropes of the conference was on "adaptability" - a term I dislike for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is used incorrectly. Anyway, how could that commander have been trained to think "adaptively" and avoid the ensuing debacle? Where my mind is going now is towards what I'm starting to call the tyranny of lexicality. Thinking through long term effects, "taking the long view", tends to be defined as a matter of "strategy" and "grand strategy", which is the prvince of generals and politicians, not CPTs. This means that implicitly CPTs are supposed to fix their perceptual and interpretive lens on a limited number of "in the present" and "in the short term" stories of what they should be doing. If they don't, then they will get hammered by the organization (that's a general observation of probabilities). Indeed, a commanders intent actually serves to define the universe of discourse and, by implication, the universe of perception.

Anyway, that's where my brain is heading at the moment. I'll see what other neuronal drivel comes out later .

Cheers,

Marc

[William F. Owen]

One of the key tropes of the conference was on "adaptability" - a term I dislike for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is used incorrectly. Anyway, how could that commander have been trained to think "adaptively" and avoid the ensuing debacle? Where my mind is going now is towards what I'm starting to call the tyranny of lexicality.

This is another excellent example. All successful armies adapt. It is inherent to their nature. However recognising that comes in two forms.

a.) Wow! It's all new and very complex. We have to adapt and become adaptive, because we have never seen this before!

b.) All good armies adapt. They do it based on need, and use evidence and fact on which to base their actions. Why can't we do that? What prevents us doing that and fooling ourselves by saying the things in item A?

IMO, how an Army describes its problems, or fails to, is strongly indicative of how it does or does not understand it's profession.

[marct]

IMO, how an Army describes its problems, or fails to, is strongly indicative of how it does or does not understand it's profession.

LOL - too true, and not just for armies either - that's applicable to all organizations.

My complaint about the term comes from viewing it as a misuse of evolutionary language and concepts. The term that they should be using, although there is no way that they could for political reasons, is "eugenics" .

Now that I have everyone hot and bothered.... .

In evolutionary theory, there are three sub-theories:

1. "natural" selection
2. heritability, and
3. mutation

All of these interlinked sub-theories refer to a basic unit which, in biology, is a DNA sequence (aka a gene). When we get into cultural areas, it's much harder to identify what the unit is, despite Dawkins term "meme". Personally, I've tried to use a decomposable basic unit appropriate to the organizational level of what I'm looking at, but that's problematic as well.

Anyhow, "natural" selection is a process that produces either positive or negative selection criteria; the criteria either "select for" or "select against" genes / memes / whatever. At least this is the general idea. It actually gets much more complex, mainly because selection criteria operate in interlinking environments that are often contained within each other (e.g. think about ecological niches as an "environment" within a larger environment...). At the socio-cultural level, it's even worse, because we are dealing with selection pressures from multiple, overlapping environments.

Here's a simple example: military organizations operate in the "field", in the back end, in the broader political environment and in the social environment. each of these different, overlapping and generally "messy" (i.e. subject to constant change and redefinition) environments produces selection pressures that may well be inverted. IOW, an action may be positively selected for in one environment and negatively selected for in another.

Take retention as a "problem area". In the operational environment, there is a positive selection pressure to have a unit deployed for a long time, especially in a COIN setting. However, in the homeland social environment, that is a negative selection pressure on the people involved (e.g. broken marriages, PTSD, etc., etc.). In the current communications environment, this homeland negative selection pressure gets translated into negative political consequences, so there is now an organization "order" to shorten deployment times. In this case, "accurately defining the problem" means recognizing the interlocking selection pressures and coming out with both a way of priorizing environments and, at the same time, mitigating some of the negative selection pressures.

So, that's natural selection.

"Heritability", in biological terms, refers to the proportion of characteristics that come from genetic rather than environmental sources. In cultural terms, it refers to "learning" and "training" (i.e. the social part of those "environmental sources"). Basically, if we want a theory of heritability that applies to socio-cultural evolution, then we focus on organizational culture, training and education.

But it's actually subtler than that, since we are (somewhat) dealing with a frequency distribution here. For example, if you are training a soldier in basic or OCS and you give 1 hour of training to "cultural awareness" and 100 to kinetic operations, which one will they default to even if the optimal solution to a particular problem was actually contained in the 1 hour? Heritability, in socio-cultural terms, actually requires reinforcement, so the perceptions and 'solutions" (and "problem definitions") will tend to come from the most heavily reinforces part of that training.

"Mutation" is really the study of how change happens in whatever your basic unit of analysis is. Mutations can be beneficial, deadly or neutral depending on the selection pressures involved and the other basic units operating to maintain the organism. In most socio-cultural settings, mutations come about both incrementally as a result of normal operations ("Normal Science" in the Kuhnian sense), via individual "point mutations" (think Road to Damascus conversions), via rapid changes in other environments that now impact the "main" socio-cultural environment of the group (think 9/11....), etc., etc. Many of the socio-cultural mutations, however, are conceived of and constructed by humans (e.g. social movements, new religious movements, revitalization movements, etc., etc.). And some of these constructed mutations are done consciously.

This brings me back to my comment about why what TRADOC is doing should be called eugenics and not adaptability.

Eugenics is the artificial construction of selection pressures that select for and against particular attributes deemed as "good".

Adaptability, OTOH, is rooted more in heritability and actually refers to the variability or scope of actions available to an organism to survive and prosper in a changing environment. In socio-cultural terms, the more you know and the faster you can flip through your options, the greater amount of adaptability you have.

Sheesh, I feel like I'm writing a monograph here.... I'll shut up now .

Cheers,

Marc

[MikeF]

John Maynard Smith produced some interesting game theory models (ESS and Hawk-Dove game) to describe how animals compete for limited resources in a restricted environment.

Simply put,

-Doves never fight.
-Hawks will always fight.
-Retaliators fight against hawks and share with doves.

This game could be applied to competing agencies with the military/government to show how some adapt, some survive, and some fail.

v/r

Mike

[marct]

Hi Mike,

Good references. Smith's models have been applied that way and, if you get into some of the really obscure journals (obscure even in academic terms ), you can find some really neat modifications and, also, some of the limitations of the ESS model (e.g. a restricted environment).

I think that Lotka's Elements of Mathematical Biology gives us some basic models, but the problem with socio-cultural evolution is that it is Lamarckian and not strictly Darwinian (i.e. the inheritance of acquired characteristics). Not a major problem, really, since all we have to do is shift the theory of heritability, but it does mean that simple predator-prey models have some major limits.

The other key difference coming out is that socio-cultural evolution is really a form of punctuated equilibrium a la Eldridge and Gould. So, we're got these "equilibrium" phases that last for a longish time and then, wham bam, we have massive mutation and all sorts of new, competing things showing up. What's "neat" about this is that there are regularities at the process level (yes, Wilf, sometimes War really is just War ).

Anyway, I think we're in one of those punctuations right now - rapid mutation, rapid shifts and changes in heritability mechanisms, etc.

***********
postscript:

I blame John for me rambling on about evolutionary theory - If I wasn't working on that paper / book, i wouldn't be doing this - maybe !

Cheers,

Marc

[Ron Humphrey]

On the problem set I really liked a lot of the business case studies I had at Baker. Mainly because the prof's where able to use them to help each of us recognize how little we actually thought about other cultures when considering what kind of business would be productive in a given place and even more importantly how the way that a given society is socially constructed is fairly indicative of what will or won't work and how.

I'll have of think of a specific one.

Wilf,

I think this

IMO, how an Army describes its problems, or fails to, is strongly indicative of how it does or does not understand it's profession.

is probably a good starting point at least for actually looking into the Process vs outcomes piece on anything from training and education to simple interactions with others in war or peace; Also think it would work for looking at almost any organization.

Not sure however that it serves as such though if we believe that our own personnel definition or description of the profession is without flaw.
If on the other hand we start with the assumption that what we think we know; may or may not be the end all be all then perhaps the discussion that happens from that approach could indeed be fairly productive.

Oaths

The Army Profession


NYT

Just a starting point