The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[marct]

Hi Wilf,

...but that's the whole problem! - Most Armies do not use "examples of what worked well in the past could guide the future concepts and provide more support for the “solutions” presented." because they are generally oblivious of what worked well in the past or even how it worked.

Serious question here, do you think it is because they don't know what worked or because they don't know why it worked (or something else)? I am asking, because I have a gut feeling that institutions that expect to win treat things that "worked" (regardless of who did them) as a reflection on their own ideologies / doctrine - a reinforcement of its correctness if you will - while things that don't work, are either used to reinforce why they don't do it that way, or why they need to adapt. Afterall, if something that has worked before doesn't anymore, it must be "new", right?

Additionally folks make fraudulent use of "positive examples" to prove what they want to prove. The Manoeuvre Warfare crowd tried to cite the German Spring 1918 Offensive as an example of Manoeuvre Warfare. In fact MW was built on an entirely fraudulent set of examples.

That, along with other examples from similar debates, always reinforced the impression in my mind that the people doing the analysis just didn't understand what they were analyzing. "Maneuver Warfare" (a doctrine / ideology) vs. "mobility" (a concept).

Finally the Army Capstone Concept, is expressly attempting to guide folks to do the one thing we know that does not work, and that is to predict the future! = "The Enemy will X and Y"

I really have no problem with the idea of attempting to predict the future. Where I have a serious problem is in the application of the incorrect form of logic to such predictions. Stating that "The Enemy" (who we don't know currently) "Will do X and Y" is, IMO, ridiculous - it is based on the application of deductive logic to the problem of prediction, where that application is totally out of line; there are too many unknown factors to apply a deductive model. If they had stated it as "The Enemy will probably attempt to X and Y", then I would have less problems with it. That's a probabilistic statement. It still has flaws (e.g. assuming a constant and uniform "Enemy"), but at least it is moving towards inductive logic which is one of the two forms that should be used (i.e. use inductive logic for fairly well understood trends and classes of opponents when you have some data about their intentions, perceptions and performance). For opponents who you don't have much data on, they should be using abductive logic.

Then again, if this is merely a PR effort designed to provide a public rationale for getting new toys, I have to wonder three things.

First, why did they bother to ask us to comment on it? Are we being used as a focus group to aid in their predicting where they will run into sales difficulty?

Second, are their PR people stupid? As a piece of public rhetoric, and a rationale for securing budgets (amongst other things), this document is pretty poor. I would recommend that their PR people read Joel Best's great little article Rhetoric in Claims-Making: Constructing the Missing Children Problem, Social Problems, Vol. 34, No. 2, (Apr., 1987), pp. 101-121.

Third, if this is a serious request for information / comments and critique, as I fully expect it is on BG McMaster's part, then I have to wonder how much of what we write here will be incorporated?

Personally, I'm all in favour of the idea of sending a draft out to us (SWC) for comments and critiques; don't get me wrong about that ! I also think that a lot of the TRADOC senior leaders really do know that this is one of the "opportunities" inherent in cyberspace. Maybe I am just being cynical, but a lot of what I read in the current version of the ACC appeared to have been written by bureaucrats (in the Byzantine sense) rather than by warfighters, strategists, or scholars.