The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

[marct]

Hi Wilf,

You know, I think we have some of the same concerns gnawing at us .

1. This document serves no useful purpose, as it stands. Doing what it intended should have taken no more 2,500 words and/or 5 pages. Having claimed not to be telling the reader what to think, it then sets out to be telling the reader that the enemy “will do X,” as opposed to “might do X, given Y or Z circumstance, and context, A, B or C.” - and where is the dividing line between Doctrine and Concept?

As I understand it, and they do seem to be using US Army specific language here, the ACC is a model that they believe is best "rough cut" for the time period under consideration. Now, that I have no problems with, although I wish that they would use the same language as everyone else and call it a "model" or "theoretical model".

Where they start to move into the "will do X", is pretty much where I stopped commenting. If this were being produced as a model, then those would be illustrative examples of how the model would be applied to particular problems. However, I find that those sections in particular are way too prescriptive for my taste because they go against the supposed basis of the concept: uncertainty.

In a similar way, when you wonder if there is a "dividing line between Doctrine and Concept", I am wondering if they are making a dividing line between a model and the results of running the model.

2. The document lacks clear and precise descriptions, and uses un-clear and highly convoluted language, none of which is helpful. - why use "new terms?"

Sort of agreed; the terms that I believe are "new" - adaptability, complexity, uncertainty - all have precise meanings. What concerns me is that they do not appear to be using them with those meanings. And, to make matters worse, the use of prescriptive language actually goes against the exact meanings of complexity, uncertainty and adaptability.

Let me take up this issue of "clear and precise descriptions" for a bit, because it is a crucial one. When you are building a model, you need to define (at the minimum) states, flows and boundaries. That's for a simple, one-level, 2 dimensional model. When you look at a 3D model, you also have to define "levels", emergence conditions and level boundaries. When you move into a 4D model of socio-cultural action space, then you also have to add in definitions of "resonance functions" and chaotic boundaries (Believe me, you don't want me going into these two 'cause they make an absolute hash out of everything you think you know about space and time!).

What we have in this model is a fairly simplistic, 2D model that is trying to incorporate some of the concepts (used in the technical, not the Army, sense of the term) from 3D and 4D models. Let me take a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean, and some of the common problems with doing this.

First, the cyberspace issue that you and I "disagree" on. How cyberspace is conceptualized in the current ACC is a very good example of the two 4D concepts I was talking about: resonance functions and chaotic boundaries. Let me start with the latter. "Cyberspace", as a "terrain" (a 2D model), is only accessible via technological extension and mediation, and yet it can (and does) have direct, real world effects on people who are not and cannot access it. The simplest effects are in the Just In Time civilian economy that has developed around it, but there are a whole slew of other areas.

Now, how cyberspace is used and understood by people, is a resonance function: the language used to "describe" and "understand" the "terrain" resonates with other cultural (and biological) perception states (think of them as components of a narrative). I believe that the current version of "understanding" shown in this document is resonating with the "understandings" of "air" as a terrain circa 1914-1920 or so. You can see the similarities in the extremely "paranoid" perceptions displayed by language use (think Hobbes' Leviathan as the basis of perception for the "nature" of the terrain); a "kill or be killed", "hack or be hacked" type of understanding with no hope of "peace" except through absolute control and domination. For the analog, go back to the fiction from the 1920's to, say, early 1940's on the devastation of airpower (or, later, on nuclear weapons).

The second example comes with narratives, which are all based around different resonance functions, few of which appear to be understood and described cleanly in this document (an exception, BTW, is the "do what you say, say what you do" meme). The model clearly has no understanding of how resonance functions operate in "narrative space". There is a vague, almost intuitive, understanding that what happens in the real world resonates back into narrative space and vice versa, but no description of the mechanisms or other resonance functions. Put extremely simplistically, you can't fight in a terrain - narrative space - unless you understand the "natural laws" operating there, and that is what a model is supposed to do; give approximations of those natural laws.

3. Implicitly this document progresses a vision of conflict that the US Army wishes to fund, and not one based on history. It seems to serve a human and organisational need, rather than a foundation for teaching (Doctrine?).
4. The idea that the US was proficient as “old Warfare” and “new Warfare” is somehow “more complex” and more challenging is untrue, and evidence free.

Agreed on the first point, although I suspect that that is an artifact from its committee nature. We could get into quibbles on the second. I think it is more "complex" based solely on what I perceive to be the solid addition of a "new" terrain which now has more real world effects than ever before. I think the argument could go either way depending on how we use the term "complex".

5. The description is the 2006 Lebanon conflict is highly simplistic, inaccurate, selective and substantially un-true. It is what the US Army wants to believe instead of looking at the facts.

Honestly, Wilf, I'll defer to your expertise on that; I don't know enough to critique it. I will say, however, that I was struck by how Hezbollah used a very simple organizational narrative that, in many ways, was very similar to what GEN Van Ripper used in Millennium Challenge.

Cheers,

Marc