getting defense right

Large language models, epochal change and true strategic policy innovation

2023-04-16T15:23:00.003-07:00

I think that we, poor old oligophrenic ‘homo sapiens’, have been using far too little strategic creativity in many of the big picture discussions we are having about creating ‘value’. That applies especially to public value creation in fundamentally important policy areas such as education, the environment, health care, mobility, etc. But it also applies to the field I am spending most of my time on: foreign, security and defense policy. The new large language models (like GPT-4) may actually prove uniquely helpful in broadening the strategic aperture of these policy debates, but only if we prod them to move beyond their training material.

Building and sharing a knowledge base on Russian international acting and thinking

2020-09-01T20:39:00.005-07:00

Great powers still matter disproportionately. This truism implies that the world would greatly benefit from getting a better analytical handle on what really makes these ever surprising geopolitical entities - first and foremost China, but to us Europeans still also Russia (and increasingly even the United States) - tick. Today, that analysis still remains very much in the hands of what I like to call 'prima donnas' (and I am of course as 'guilty', as many of the colleagues I'm 'charging' here). Many of us have been studying these countries intensively for decades. Many of us have come to different conclusions about what these actors have been doing, about what is really makes them 'tick'. Many of us write articles, reports and books; we advise decision-makers; we present and discuss our views at conferences; we are active on social media; we interact with more traditional media. Very few of us, however, have been trying to build a dispassionate, comprehensive, rigorous and creative knowledge base. Georgia Tech and HCSS have been engaged in such an effort for the past two years, and we would like to invite interested colleagues to reach out to us to join us in this effort.

2017-02-25T20:07:00.000-08:00

"Le pessimisme est d'humeur; l'optimisme est de volonté" [Propos sur le bonheur (1928) d'Emile-Auguste Chartier, dit Alain]

I heard this great expression today on my favorite French weekly talk-show "On n'est pas couché". It means (loosely translated): "Pessimism is a matter of mood; optimism is a matter of will".

While this is one of those wonderful aphorisms that make you go 'hmmmm', I personally think it is not entirely accurate. Humans (at least some of us 😊) appear to have a certain innate disposition towards optimism as well. But overall, I do think this expression nicely captures one of those evolutionary characteristics of good old sapiens: that the worrywarts may historically have had certain advantages over their lucky-go-happy counterparts. The role that our amygdala, for instance, plays in our brain, may very well be the anatomical incarnation of that particular disposition. But fortunately (from my point of view) our optimistic inclinations - 'the better angels in our nature', in the expression borrowed from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address by Steven Pinker in his wonderful 2011 book http://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature ) - also survived evolution. And I think that they may increasingly be turning into an asset rather than a liability. But yes, it sometimes does require some 'guts' to activate our brains' optimistically inclined synaptic connections these days. Especially in 'my' professional environment, where gloom and doom seems to be even more en vogue than ever.

This year's HCSS contribution to the Dutch government's Strategic Monitor 2017 (http://hcss.nl/report/volatility-and-friction-age-disintermediation), which was presented last week to to the public and to various government departments, tries to provide a more balanced look at what is happening in the world, what it means, and what we can do about it.

Our monitoring effort, based on – yet again – a number of new datasets and visualization tools, shows a mixed picture. We document growing assertiveness and dangerous brinkmanship by (a few) great powers; shifting global geodynamics in which Europe is still potentially quite influential, but doesn’t manage to live up to the potential in reality; growing conflict numbers in certain categories; increasing volatility in the international system (and we even developed a – still largely experimental – indicator (the HCSS VIM-index) to measure this). But we also show what we call ‘the other side of the violence coin’, where a number of technological and economic trends are continuing to empower and connect and improve the lives of many millions of individuals in what used to be called the billion bottom.

Our main (contrarian) interpretation of what we are witnessing around us is that what we are seeing is not 'just' the return of populism, not 'just' the fragilization of the international institutional rules-based system of global governance that we had grown accustomed to since the Second World War; not 'just' the backlash against liberalism and globalization by the segments of our populations that have been (read: that 'we' have allowed to become) left behind. We argue that we may be witnessing a much more profound global transformation in which some of the 'social technologies' that dominated the industrial age (the 'company'; 'government', 'state-based international organizations', etc.) are increasingly coming under pressure. In some sense, these were just the 'middle men' that our societies invented in order to leverage the revolutionary physical technologies that became available in the industrial age. In a process of 'disintermediation', we are now increasingly starting to cut out these middle men. Think of platform companies like Airbnb or Uber competing the hell out of hotel chains and taxi companies. Think of Tesla trying to sell fully electric cars surpassing car dealerships. But also think of Putin or ISIS targeting individuals in our societies in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

The conclusion the report draws from all of this for our defense and security organizations is that we may have to start rethinking the way in which we can achieve our defense and security objectives in a radically different and (hopefully) more effective and sustainable way. Our political systems, our international organizations, our government structures, but also our security forces and our armed forces may increasingly have to start rethinking who they are, what they do, and how they do it. Their private sector equivalents are increasingly morphing themselves into platform businesses with thriving ecosystems around them that manage to capture far more economic value – for themselves AND for their – often totally new and much smaller – ecosystem partners - than any of their more ‘pipeline’-like counterparts have ever been able to do. In the words of IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty, they are becoming increasingly much more B2I (‘business to individual’) than B2B (‘business to business’) or B2G (‘business to government’) or B2C (‘business to consumer’ – in a transactional sense’). Should we start thinking along analogous lines for our defense and security organizations? Is it conceivable that they might be able to generate superior (defense and security) value for (defense and security) value by assuming more of a platform role? A platform that ‘nudges’ a far more heterogeneous set of sensors and effectors throughput the defense and security ecosystem to start generating ‘security value’ in different ways? Much earlier in the conflict cycle (prevention) and with much more of a focus on stimulating the agents of resilience – the healthy fibers of our society that abhor gratuitous radicalism. violence and conflict - than in ‘only’ combatting the agents of conflict? Using ways that are as different from the ‘old’ ways as Tesla is from the big-three in Detroit in global mobility? As ‘P4’ (Personalized, Predictive, Preventive, Participatory) medicine is from our current more traditional health care systems?

The (downside and upside) risk space in terms of defense and security is widening, deepening, and flipping. Our defense and security organizations still have to be able to contribute to the stabilization of some of Europe’s fragile neighbors from the Western Sahara to Belarus – hopefully in more sustainably successful ways than we have been able to do for the past 20 years. They still have to be able to intervene in crises where we feel that both established and emerging global standards (genocide, territorial aggression, other crimes against humanity, etc.) are being transgressed. They once again also have to be able to defend our own alliance borders against potential high-end conventional and nuclear threats. And on top of all of this, they also have to be able to keep our populations safe from terrorist, cyber, influence. AI, etc. threats. That already represents a significant deepening and widening parts of the risk space. But they - in our opinion- should also increasingly start thinking about how they might be able to bolster the 'positive' side of the security coin, which we risk ignoring by being so transfixed on the prophets of gloom and doom. There are still myriad positive developments taking place in this real - and we suggest that any defense and security organization that would be bold enough to start developing some capabilities in that area may gain some competitive advantage in both a coalitional context and vis-a-vis potential opponents.

In our assessment, the current financial-economic and political-economic realities of European defense budgets - even in Central Europe - are unlikely to move upward as much as they may have to in order to adequately cover all of these trends within the traditional (industrial-age) paradigm. We also emphasize that the political focus on the input side of our defense value proposition (e.g. % of GDP spent on defense) is unlikely to provide the right incentives to improve the actual output (let alone the impact) of our defense and security efforts - and it may even work perversely. If our defense and security organizations have to do more, with only marginally more money, and if they seem unlikely to be able to do so within the current defense and security paradigm - then how can we possibly we square the circle? In our report, we argue that this can only be done by truly changing the paradigm. We are greatly encouraged by the strong leadership that both the Chief of Defense and the Minister of Defense in the Netherlands have displayed in catalyzing the coalescing of a defense and security ecosystem during the Future Force Conference 2017, where 1200 participants started giving real meaning to the concept. A large number of very concrete follow-on activities are already in the pipeline now to push this initiative even further - at both a whole-of-government AND an whole-of-ecosystem level.

Europe took the lead in 'reimagining' defense and security in the industrial age. That age was jump-started in Europe, with the United Kingdom in the lead, and various parts of the continent following suit. These countries' forward leaning stakeholders, in both competition and cooperation with each other, jumped on the new both physical and social technological innovations that were emerging in the transition to the industrial age to put themselves ahead of the pack. Europe may no longer be at the forefront of many technological developments as the world is transitioning to a post-industrial age. But it is still well positioned. And its political economy of defense may still be somewhat less beholden to various legacy lobbies than is the case in various other parts of the world. We therefore submit that Europe might still have a fighting chance to navigate the transition to a post-industrial incarnation of 'armed force' more elegantly than many other. Ironically, the current Zeitgeist may actually provide a unique impulse in that direction. Some argue that the current undeniable turbulence in the world system means that Europe has to 'wake up' from its (unreal) dream, and has to start behaving again like we did in the past 2 centuries: "standing up for ourselves"; "negotiating from strength", etc.

The 2017 HCSS contribution to the strategic monitor of the Dutch government suggests an alternative course of action., One that does not just 'remember the future' (as our brains are wired to do), but (once again) creatively shapes the future. Daring to think that not only our security environment might change, but that also 'we' will have to change, that 'we' will have to start doing different things, with different capabilities and with different operational (and strategic) concepts. . (Dutch) (A)rmed forces as the catalysts of a broader defense and security ecosystem that may offer us a better (fighting!) chance to generate defense and security value for those who live near and with us.

"Pessimism is a matter of mood; optimism is a matter of will". We are not predestined to relive the 1930s - European nationalism/populism/fascism/corporatism; the 'Bloodlands'; Stalin's repressions; 'Munich', etc. Or even the Concert of Europe of the 19th century - which did ultimately lead to three unusually bloody intra-European wars in 1867, 1914 and 1940 . Let alone the terrible fratricidal European wars that preceded the Treaties of Westphalia, The future is ours to shape, As was the case at Westphalia. As was the case in Versailles. As was the case after WWII. The fundamental vectors (Phänomenologie des Geistes) that were described in Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' are being contested, But they do linger on. Despite appearances, liberal democracies still have certain unparalleled advantages. Deepmind is in London and the startup scene in Europe (Berlin,. Amsterdam is vibrant like never before. Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Intel, LinkedIn, McAfee, Netflix, Oracle, Paypal, Roku, Salesforce, Symantec, Twitter, Yahoo, etc. are in Silicon Valley. Many of these companies are disruptively transforming the spaces they operate in. The same cannot be said for defense and security. In our opinion, any open-eyed European monitoring effort should suggest that this - the ecosystem: our (uniquely powerful) own, but also our opponents' - is the current center of gravity of our planning/design efforts.

Going Back to the Roots: A Meta-Epochal Etymological Glossary of 'Military' Terms

2017-02-25T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Military and the 'Kill Chain'

2017-02-25T13:42:00.000-08:00

Many discussions about defense and 'the military' assume that 'killing' lies at the heart of the profession. I find that assumption not only strange, but wrong. The reason why we have armed forces is to sustainably achieve our defense and security objectives through some capability bundle that (hopefully) provides excellent value for money. 'Force' clearly needs to be part of that capability bundle. But there are many ways of instantiating, actuating force.

Let us assume that we can, at times, identify 'evil incarnate'. A person or force so demonstrably vile that 'the public good' would agree it should be stopped. Even in a clearcut case like this one, why would the physical annihilation of that person or force be the optimal course of action? The person, it is true, would no longer be able to pursue his (and let's face it: this is the most dominant gender in this category) 'evil' intent. This may arguably even be a 'net gain' for the international community. But the 'kill' will also trigger strong negative reactions from relatives, friends, like-minded people. More importantly, from my point of view, this particular course of action deprives his victims as well as all of us from the salubrious (and potentially cathartic) process of 'legal discovery'. [We have a quite wonderful word in Dutch for this: 'rechtsvinding' - literally 'finding what's right'. Which precedes rechtsschepping and rechtstoepassing - the actual creation and application of law. The German corollary 'Urteilsfinding' is already too focused on the actual trial; as is 'legal discovery'].

It may therefore be more appropriate - not from a legal, not from an ethical, but from a strictly security-pragmatic point of view - to contemplate alternative courses of action. One of the most attractive ones I can identify would be to identify such potential cases, to obtain a 'warrant' to track them, find them, and bring them before a court of law. Killing the perpetrator, in this 'due process' would also kill the rechtsvinding. But incapacitating this person or force, extracting it from the conflict space and bringing it to a neutral space where

Think of the conflict denial effect (it's more than just prevention, it's the forceful denial of conflict) effect. If the international community, pursuant to a professional, traceable, non-politicized, probabilistic analysis based on a number of clear (politically agreed upon) criteria (as, say, is the standard in modern national legal jurisdictions), would decide such a course of action would be warranted, it could then intervene before the conflict breaks lose.

Think of the conflict escalation dominance effect - international 'adult supervision' could at any given moment call for a 'time out' in any conflict and 'force' (armed force!)/'nudge'/induce the parties to a conflict to pursue alternative ways of achieving their objectives.

Maybe even most importantly, think of the deterrent effect of such a course of action. Any individual or group of individuals that would be a party in any conflict would at any given moment in time throughout a possible crisis escalation dynamic realize that his/her actions would be subject to global public scrutiny based on globally recognized principles of international 'law'. The likely proliferation of .

Building new datasets for foreign and security policy analysis

2015-02-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

I have long been very frustrated about the lack of a systematic empirical basis for our analysis of foreign and security policy. Newspapers, with their many well-known biases, essentially dictate what 'facts' are and 'analysts' and 'scholars' then cherry-pick these 'facts' to buttress whatever theory, ideology, etc. they espouse. A number of new datasets and tools hold great promise to revolutionize this state of affairs.

Capability-Based Planning: The Fight Continues...

2014-10-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

Dr. Ben Taylor, Team Leader of Strategic Planning Operations Research at Canada's DRDC has authored an interesting new piece that outlines some of the main tenets of what I have called the TTCP school of capability-based planning. It builds on a 2011 TTCP meeting in Ottawa I had the pleasure to attend. The paper is called 'Analysis Support to Strategic Planning' and has now been approved for unlimited release. Since I have not been able to find a copy on the internet (yet), I am taking the liberty of making it available on my blog and of adding a few personal thoughts.

2014-08-31T17:44:00.001-07:00

I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.

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2013-08-07T06:26:00.000-07:00

Stephan's Top-10 Book Recommendations for Defence and Security Planning

Paul Davis
Beinhocker
Taleb
Zolli & Healy

European Defence Agency's First-Ever War Game

2013-06-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

From June 4-6, the European Defence Agency (EDA) will conduct its first ever war game in The Hague. The game will stress-test EDA's current Capability Development Plan against a stretching set of scenario ensembles. HCSS and TNO are the core team that was contracted by EDA to assist in the preparation and execution of this war game, which we called ECAPAG (European Capability Assessment Game). This table-top exercise will bring together participants from EDA’s participating Member States as well as from EU entities like the European Union Military Committee and the Crisis Management & Planning Directorate. HCSS developed a method to derive a set of scenarios from a large volume of foresight studies in a traceable way that can also be regularly updated. HCSS, in close cooperation with TNO, also formulated a computer-assisted game design that allows to translate these scenario ensembles into capability trends for each of the tasks described in the EDA's Generic Military Task List as well as for possible new tasks that may emerge from the game.

Attachment security

2012-10-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a large EU project on societal security, I have been reading up what we called the unexplored crevasses of security. One of the big discoveries for me was the rich literature on attachment security
reminded by the Boris Cyrulnik, the impressive French popular writer
link to resilience,
talked on Laurent Ruquier (10/7/2012) about the serenity of a kid experiencing a bombing raid in a basement in the security of his closest family vs the fear of a kid that might be far away from the bombs but also from those securitizing links
also mentions the favellas in Rio:
when police is sent in, the main guys of the gangs have to show they are tough
now they send in soccer players, samba dancers, etc - create links, attachments

C'est l'exemple des favelas de Sao Paulo au Brésil, où j'ai travaillé : les enfants envoyaient balader les psychologues, mais pas les guitaristes, les danseurs de samba ou les footballeurs, avec lesquels un début de lien se tissait. Avec cette méthode culturelle, le président Lula a pacifié 50 % des favelas, là où la police avait échoué . Donc il y a du travail culturel à faire, il faut convaincre les hommes politiques que c'est possible.

The rise of the rest

2012-10-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

"The decline of the West and the rise of the rest" has become a very popular one-liner amongs the kommentariat.

UK equivalent : ask the average Britton

but also other away of looking at this: the rest is becoming like the West. Which may have enormous implications for armed forces. right now, we are willing to do things in 'the rest' that we would never tolerate in 'the West'. e.g. strike and collateral damage.
we are still willing to use 'force' in the West when we feel that
but we don't fire live ammo - we use rubber bullets, tear gas, water canon

2012-09-07T16:50:00.001-07:00

Just a thought on 'effective' defense. Think of us humans as a biological species. In the bigger scheme of things, we must be among the most vulnerable of all species. Not much natural 'force protection' - no armature, etc. Not much 'mobility' - just try outrunning a cheetah. Not very strong when compared to other primates or other much stronger species. Not all that big as you find out when you look in awe at an elephant or a giraffe. No real special weapons like venom, sharp teeth or claws, vicious horns, electric rays or any other types of weapons that nature has invented. And yet, the 'force', the capability bundle we have evolutionarily developed trumps all of these better protected, faster, bigger, intrinsically deadlier species. Might there not be a lesson in that for our defense organizations?
For those interested in this, I recommend this fascinating article in Scientific American.

The sad state of affairs in 'applied' security studies

2012-09-03T05:04:00.001-07:00

I always jealously look at articles in other theoretical disciplines (say in the 'life' sciences) that often synoptically summarize the main hypotheses for phenomena they are struggling with in some box with the authors in the left column, and their findings (which are often contradictory, especially when you're dealing with small-N research) in the other. But how many of those do we have in say international relations theory? The same applies to the more applied side of strategic studies. In many fields that are - or at least should be, if strategy were really about 'big picture' isues - of interest to us (say economic policies, or social policy or even education, health policy), international organizations produce much empirically-based comparative research. I am, for instance, a great fan and avid reader of the various forms of 'benchmarking' work that the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF do in these various areas. Just trying to 'dissect' various policies that countries follow in those areas, trying to come up with various (input, throughput AND output - and sometimes even outcome) indicators and then seeing if we can somehow map all of those in a search for waht seems to work (under which circumstances, etc.) We have absolutely nothing of the sort in the field of international security. NATO has no mandate to do so (although some of us are trying to change this) and has no real 'in-house think tank anyway - only some embryonic fragments exist throughout the organization, such as in the Policy Planning Staff in the Private Office of the Secretary-General; in the newly created 'Emerging Security Challenges Division' within the and within ACT

the EU might (but not in the defense realm, and even if it did, it would not likely have the guts to include non-EU states in the comparisons). And the OSCE or the UN are hardly worth mentioning in this context. [Incidentall, given the current state of international governance I still think that the OECD would be perfect for this job - PRECISELY because it has so little

Reconceptualizing security within the EU

2012-09-03T04:59:00.003-07:00

We recently finished an interesting piece of work in the framework of a large-scale European Union-funded collaborative research project “European Security Trends and Threats In Society” (ETTIS). We essentially downloaded thousands of articles from ALL academic disciplines that deal with how security is defined, what dimensions it has and how it can be dealt with. I have been in the field of security studies for about 25 years now, but some of the insights we found in other disciplines were just eye-opening (and mouth-watering!)...
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RAND / rational choice / personalities

2012-09-03T03:07:00.000-07:00

I have for some reason always felt closer to (even if less well-versed in) economists than to political scientists. The rational choice paradigm that was so dominant at UCLA when I was doing my Ph.D. work there is certainly to a large extent responsible for that. But also a number of personal encounters with. When I came back to RAND Santa Monica in 2000(for what unfortunately only turned out to be one year), I happened to be in a room in the old 5-floor building that was only a few doors away from the office of Tom Schelling - who would go on to win the 2005 Nobel prize winner in the field of Economics. Schelling, whose did much of his seminal work at RAND in the 50s that he published when he went to Harvard as 'Strategy of Conflict' apparently maintained some affiliation with RAND for much of his career.

expertise and interests were extremely broad who still spent some time at RAND as a visiting scholar. He gave a talk on smoking and on climate change. Also discussed with him

Tom Schelling . I knew his primarily as a military strategist and a applied game theorist, but that summer I found out a number of his other interests. This had a big impact on me - taking some of the most important 'strategic topics' and just applying the full range of analytical tools + 'big picture'

6 by 4 index cards, methodically surgically went through the various arguments pro and con. evidence based, (pluri!)theoretically conversant - but most of all creativity-inspired and policy-focused. And most important of all - in readable English.

"a central figure in the Rand "oral tradition" that gave shape to strategic thinking as it emerged in the 1960s and--it is still about all we have--the 1970s." - never heard about this "oral tradition" but looking back I have to admit that that 'oral tradition' at RAND may have taught me more than I ever realized. The old RAND building had been constructed by to maximize the probability of chance encounters.

pdf

And indeed - whether by design or by default - that did tend to happen.

'military strategist' - systems analysis "The germination date was August, 1945; and the movement reached a kind of maturity from which it never recovered, when it moved in 1961

into the Establishment, the Departments of State and Defense. The idea stage was about over then, although books reflecting earlier thought and work continued to appear in the early 1960s."

“mat discourse,” see Kubo (2006).Kubo, Michael, Constructing the Cold War Environment: The Architecture of the RAND Corporation, 1950–2005, thesis, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2006.

This reminds me of Jack Hirshleifer

2012-03-16T14:59:00.002-07:00

More roots

Three roots for *ar
*h2er-
*h1er-
*h3er-

Kinetic capabilities

2012-02-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

I have referred in this blog multiple times to the growing unease - among military and non-military people alike - about our current capability portfolio. I think the discussions about the term 'kinetic capabilities' are an interesting example of this debate. My own take in this debate for the past few years has been that we just need a better balance between 'kinetic' and 'non-kinetic' capabilities. Upon reflection, I will now start talking about 'old kinetic' (industrial) and 'new kinetic' (information-age) capabilities.

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Ecosystem (forward) innovation

2011-10-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

Strategy and Change

Post-ismism

2011-10-28T06:37:00.001-07:00

I have never understood why so many defense and security analysts typically come out on the mercantilist/protectionist side of so many of the 'big' political economy questions.

It seems to me that we are finally (albeit painstakingly gradually) starting to transcend the 'ism'-debates

recent issues

The hybris of strategic analysis

2011-07-20T20:38:00.001-07:00

on vacation. thinking about life etc.

dissatisfied with our field - strategic research.
failed massively time after time - little sign of change
foresight
also on strategic advice
I have always felt that we as a professional group assume a unique position in strategic policymaking. With that position - I feel - also come great responsibilities. I have heard a number of my colleagues refer to the 'right to be irresponsible'. Often in a semi-jocular way, typically to ingratiate themselves in the presence of policymakers ("we know where we stand - we come up with the ideas, you are the ones who pick and therefore also are responsible"). But such statements have always struck me as extremely disingenuous.

I have been impressed with the almost painful self-reflection that is occurring right now in the field of economics.
But whereas economists are reviewing some of the basic tenets and tools of their profession'
The economics profession is heading into years of turmoil that will be tremendously beneficial for academics, particularly young people who can help invent the new theories and ideas.
(just like Great Depression (Keynesiansim) and again inflation in the 70s (Chicago School) led to major changes in economics )

problems:

Foresight
Humans - and especially strategic decisionmakers - seem to have an almost insatiable thirst for predictions of the future. Despite the fact that our collective record on this score is dismal we as a profession still gladly participate in the hoax of prediction. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, our profession continues to claim that we have some privileged insights into what the future might bring. that pundits - partly at the request of our customers, but mostly driven by our own intellectual hybris (so no excuses)
The forest vs the trees
To me 'strategy' is about the 'big picture'. And yet I am continuously amazed at how rarely we as a profession engage in the 'big picture' analysis that should be the heart of strategic analysis. The market for 'big picture' issues is typically fairly small - in the public sector as well as in the private sector, for 'small' actors as well as for 'big' ones. Even the US, which outspends all other nations on various forms of policy analysis in our field, has no real money allocated for this: the research money flows through the (very stovepiped) departments whereas the inter-agency process does deal with some big-picture issues but has no money to spend on research. We as a profession are therefore often asked about the trees (in 'our' neck of the woods) and forget about the forest.

The fallibility of data sets

I have never understood why the economics pages of (quality) newpapers are filled with rich (near real-time) datasets whereas the 'world' pages tend to be filled with mostly pictures and discursive text. The situation in the academic world is not much different - the datasets

The accept 'data' at face value - most of us realize that we should (and can) do better, but we take the easy way out

most of the datasets (on economics, on conflict, etc.) we have are flawed - most of us realize this, but we all happily throw out the caveats and use the
we do not have data on many of the things we would like (/need) to know

we almost never do our homework on security/defense/foreign policy analysis. Every textbook on policy analysis (and more importantly - just plain common sense) suggests that

Technological backwardness

We live in an age

we are technologically backwards - how can one explain that the new methods to 'datamine' the 'big data' that our increasingly ubiquitous (some have called it 'panoptic') sensors are collecting are being used more for customer relationship management by private businesses than by the highest-level political decisionmakers on issues of strategic importance
Downside vs upside risk
As a profession we seem to wallow in gloom and doom. We observe youth bulges in certain part of the world and immediately think of ticking time bombs and trouble - instead of (also) seeing a growing demand for freedom, dignity and 'normalcy' that offers unprecedented (security) opportunities.
Elitism

we sustain the 'elitist' (and deterministic) approach to strategy

Protectionism
For some reason I find quite inexplicable, the security community tends to end up in the camp that opposes free trade and the free flow of factors of production. Many old crass mercantilist arguments against free trade are now largely out of vogue. Nobody argues any more, as the predecessors of the current 'realists' claimed, that trade sapped the vital juices of a nation (bullion)

When we look at migration, we see all sorts of threats in the guise of fifth columns, sectoral violence, destabilizing flows, and we largely ignore the various beneficial effects that migration has had throughout history.

we struggle to retain our (intellectual/political/financial) independence
[on the upside] we are are strategically fairly irrelevant - although we (as a profession) are unfortunately relevant enough to throw the lives on many people in the balance
we have ignored costs

no bonus without malus

If there is one thing I agree on with the 'gloom and doom boom' crowd', then it is that we live at a crucial juncture in time. Yes, power is changing - but my sense is that it is changing in a much more profound way than the people who talk about power shifts claim. And this more structural power shift also offers a whole set of new opportunities.

Capabilities that didn't bark

2011-05-20T08:49:00.001-07:00

Joint Ops 2030 receives NATO's 2011 Scientific Achievement Award

2011-04-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

The NATO Research and Technology Board, the highest authority within the NATO Research and Technology Organization, has awarded the RTO 2011 Scientific Achievement Award to the Long-Term Scientific Study on Joint Operations 2030.

My colleague Frank Bekkers and myself spent much time and effort on this study on which I have already blogged. The letter from RTB Chairman Dr. Walker states that "this Award recognizes exceptional effort in significant RTO activities, excellence and originality in the scientific and technica! content therein, as well as outstanding results in terms of military benefit.' While we are of course proud to have received this award, I want to take advantage of this occasion to share some ideas on the way in which we conduct this type of research within the Alliance.

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Power and capability planning

2011-04-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

I already mentioned - in an entry with some more personal ruminations about 'power' - that HCSS is running a project (big in scope, small in funding...) on the Nature of Power. Our interest in this was piqued from a number of different angles: our frustration with the limitations of the IR debate on these issues; our ongoing efforts to develop better data sets in the field of international relations; our fascination with the often simplistic debates about the future of power ('Decline of the West and Rise of the West' - power transition; or 'Decline of the state and rise of the non-state' - power diffusion). But it also had a powerful (pun intended) connection to the field of defence and security capability development. If our view on the nature of power is broadening - EVEN in the field on international relations (see the discussions on 'soft' and 'smart' power - shouldn't this have some implications for the way in which we conceive of - and develop - defence capabilities? Are there untapped crevasses of real power that Westerm governments and defense organizations can start exploring and maybe even developing - just as we do with other areas of more traditional kinetic power?

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Strategic operations research

2011-03-26T09:31:00.001-07:00