The Committee of Public Safety

I’ve been following Kotare’s examination of the Generations of War (4GW) framework over at The Strategist:

1. On the bullshit of “generations of war”
2. Roots – the origin of “generations of war”
3. “We few, we happy few, we band of [1GW] brothers”
4. “Cohorts of War” – a general framework

Kotare has gone from a straight up attack on 4GW to a somewhat tentative embrace, even developing his own “cohorts of war” pantomime of 4GW. David Rondfeldt made this comment:

From a different angle, always open for discussion and refinement, here’s an alternative, four-fold view, focused on organization and doctrine, that John Arquilla and I have elaborated before, including before I knew about 4GW:

“Accordingly, the history of warfare is a history of the progressive development of four fundamental forms of engagement: the melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming. Briefly, warfare has evolved from chaotic melees in which every man fought on his own, to the design of massed but often rigidly shaped formations, and then to the adoption of maneuver. Swarming appears at times in this lengthy history, but its major advances as a doctrine will occur in the coming years. Some are now underway.”

If this formulation ever looks interesting, go here to download our old Rand study on “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311/

Chapter Two (pp. 7-23) is about the evolution of military organization and doctrine: melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming, with reference to the roles of information and information technology in the evolution of these four forms.

What that write-up does not show, except in a passing footnote, is that this formulation derives from a view of social evolution — my pet theory about TIMN — which holds that, across the ages, societies have come up with only four major forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions (as in states and their militaries), markets, and networks. Thus, early tribes are associated with melees, hierarchical institutions with the devekopment of massed formations, the rise of market-oriented societies with the turn to maneuver doctrines, and now the information age with networked swarming.

4GW overlaps with networked swarming.

My comment was  growing a bit lengthy so it’s been upgraded to a post:

David Ronfeldt’s TIMN is a much better general framework than the Generations of War framework. Every iteration of the Generation of War framework eventually runs into the problem that the phenomena it describes (line and column, maneuver, etc.) do not manifest themselves linearly throughout history. Someone who wishes to keep using the Generations of War for substantive analysis must then replace their generations with some other categorization that allows each “generation” to appear in parallel with other “generations” or appear before a “generation”, disappear, and then reappear again. Always in motion these generations are. Inevitably, the temptation arises to substitute “gradient”, “gradation”, (my apologies Peter) “cohort”, or some other numerically denominated category for the original “generation”. TIMN, on the other hand, unfolds chronologically from tribe to institution to market to network but all elements of TIMN have manifested themselves in varying degrees since the beginning of human history and they are all manifesting themselves now to varying degrees. F.A. Hayek’s one insightful comment fits in with TIMN:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.

Much of the interesting implications of TIMN comes from the lag between the mental universe our mind inhabits (that of the tribe) and the complex world we inhabit (in order from least to most confusing, institution, market, network). The much smaller lag between Lind’s original four generations is less threatening because it has yet to cause the mental contortions of the lag between tribe, institution, market, and network.

TIMN also intersects with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis:

The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

The key insight of AMH is the lag between the speed of biological evolution and the speed of cultural evolution:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

A specific example of lag that the AMH paper discusses is the structure of the triune brain:

The starting point is a basic fact about the brain: it is not a homogeneous mass of nerve cells but a collection of specialized components, many of which have been identified with particular functions and types of behavior. For example, the brainstem, which is located at the base of the brain and sits on top of the spinal cord, controls the most basic bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat and is active even during deep sleep. The limbic system, which comprises several regions in the middle of the brain, is responsible for emotions, instincts, and social behavior such as feeding, fight-or-flight responses, and sexuality. And the cerebral cortex, which is the tangled maze of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain, is what allows us to think complex and abstract thoughts and where language and musical abilities, logical reasoning, learning, long-term planning, and sentience reside. These three areas form the triune brain model, proposed by MacLean; he refers to them as the reptilian, mammalian, and hominid brains, respectively. This terminology underscores his hypothesis that the human brain is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which basic survival functions appeared first, more advanced social behavior came second, and uniquely human cognitive abilities emerged most recently (that is, within the past 100,000 years).

My previous post commented:

From this we can postulate three biological OODA loops within the human brain, each one with ever shorter lags in adaptation:

1. The reptilian loop
2. The mammalian loop
3. The hominid loop

If we follow the momentum of AMH and take the logic of evolution into less biologically hardwired human “software”, we can see five OODA loops and the steadily decreasing lag between each:

1. The cultural loop
2. The political loop
3. The strategic loop
4. The operational loop
5. The tactical loop

Much of the adaptation mismatches that occur in human political communities and individuals can be traced to adaptive lag. A particular loop is optimized for a specific environment and acquires optimizations peculiar to that environment. However, the environment changes and loops with slower lag times adapt at a sometimes glacial pace. Within the “software” portion of the human brain, culture is the slowest to adapt, followed by politics, and strategy. This is not to say rapid adaption in software can’t happen at these higher levels like culture, only that, on average, adaption will be slower than the lowest levels.As the AMH argues, systemic human irrationality is not necessarily globally irrational as it is locally irrational. Many adaptations such as heuristics and cognitive biases make sense in a legacy adaption context but make less sense in a contemporary adaption context. They are rational under the right circumstances but irrational under other circumstances. Similarly, the software stack of adaptation contains rationalities under some contexts but irrationalities under other contexts. The true measure of adaptive capacities is how rapidly irrationalities can be replaced with rationalities. Since some irrationalities are bound up in emotion and power distributions, this isn’t always easy. On the other hand, some adaptions which seem irrational to a “rational” observer and that are done away with turn out to have been rational after all. The end result is a stack of OODA loops that contain a mix of rationality and irrationality and lag behind the adaption curve on average.

TIMN fits this logic very well. The human brain is very optimized for the tribe, the dominant form of human organization for 99.999999% of our shared history. When dealing with inter-familial or inter-personal relations, our brains function reasonably well. When, as Hayek expounded, we take that same tribal mindset and apply it to the more complex “macro-cosmos” of the institution, market, or network, our touch is less sure and our errors are larger. This increasingly veers into Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “fourth quadrant” where the optimized structures of our brain run into phenomena their less and less able to accurately process. From this quadrant emerges the “black swans” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has loosed upon the world. You need more than four generations to digest them.