The Committee of Public Safety

Links to my assumptions series:

1. Assumptions: Desire
2. Assumptions: Adaption
3. Assumptions: Control
4. Assumptions: Power
5. Assumptions: Complex Adaptive Systems
6. Assumptions: OODA Loop
7. Assumptions: Orientation
8. Assumptions: Decision
9. Assumptions: Adaption Stack
10. Assumptions: Culture
11. Assumptions: Politics
12. Assumptions: Strategy
13. Assumptions: Operational Art
14. Assumptions: Tactics
15. Assumptions: War

I’m a big fan of historian Walter McDougall. In my opinion, McDougall is in the midst of writing the best series of histories about these United States. The two volumes he has completed thus far are Freedom Just Around the Corner : A New American History: 1585-1828 and Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877. Since he is a generalist dipping into many far-flung domains, devotees of a particular area of focus may be appalled by his conclusions within their chosen bailiwick. As a Mormon, for example, I’d quibble with his portrayal of Joseph Smith, the founder of my faith. However, his treatment is more nuanced than other portraits I’ve encountered. In balance, his judgments are usually sound and balanced, and he’s not afraid to offer them.

Another McDougall book that throws some interesting light onto recent discussions in the stratesphere over American grand strategy is Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, published back in 1997 but still relevant. Following an approach that reminded me of Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, McDougall identifies two main themes in United States’s relationship with the outside world. Both are referenced in the title of his book: the Promised Land and the Crusader State. The Promised Land theme refers to the earliest tradition in American foreign policy that focused on preserving American liberty from threats abroad, especially those which, by the domestic response they triggered, could lead to internal corruption, despotism, and division at home. The Crusader State theme covers a later foreign policy tradition where America went abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The first tradition was the dominant influence for most of the nineteenth century and the second dominated the twentieth and into the twenty-first. McDougall refines these two themes into further subdivisions, identifying four sub-themes under the Promised Land theme and four under the Crusader State theme.

McDougall, with a strong awareness of the impact of religion on American history that shows up in this and many of his other works, relabels the two traditions as the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” of American foreign policy:

Our Old Testament:

1. Liberty, or Exceptionalism (so called)
2. Unilateralism, or Isolationism (so called)
3. The American System, or Monroe Doctrine (so called)
4. Expansionism, or Manifest Destiny (so called)

Our New Testament:

1. Progressive Imperialism
2. Wilsonianism, or Liberal Internationalism (so called)
3. Containment
4. Global Meliorism

More later…

Horst Rittel, in inventing the “wicked problem“, described it as having ten characteristics:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

The explanation offered by the TRADOC pamphlet Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design is in the spirit of Herr Rittel but passes it through the cold, clammy grip of the color sucking vampires of DoD terminology (e.g. the rather colorful and memorable phrase “wicked problem” becomes the rather limp “ill-structured problem”):

1. There is no definitive way to formulate an ill-structured problem.
2. We cannot understand an ill-structured problem without proposing a solution.
3. Every ill-structured problem is essentially unique and novel.
4. Ill-structured problems have no fixed set of potential solutions.
5. Solutions to ill-structured problems are better-or-worse, not right-or-wrong.
6. Ill-structured problems are interactively complex.
7. Every solution to an ill-structured problem is a ‘one-shot operation.’
8. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to an ill-structured problem.
9. Ill-structured problems have no ‘stopping rule’.
10. Every ill-structured problem is a symptom of another problem.
11. The problem-solver has no right to be wrong.

Jeff Conklin narrowed this down to six characteristics:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

CACD provides this helpful breakdown on how dealing with the wicked problem differs from more righteous problems:

Well-Structured “Puzzle”

• Problem Structuring: The problem is self- evident. Structuring is trivial.
• Solution Development: There is only one right solution. It may be difficult to find.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique.
• Adaptive Iteration: No adaptive iteration required.

Medium-Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals easily agree on its structure.
• Solution Development: There may be more than one “right” answer. Professionals may disagree on the best solution. Desired end state can be agreed.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique and adjust solution.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required to find the best solution.

Ill-Structured “Wicked Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals will have difficulty agreeing on problem structure and will have to agree on a shared starting hypothesis.
• Solution Development: Professionals will disagree on:
  • How the problem can be solved.
  • The most desirable end state.
  • Whether it can be attained.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique, adjust solution, and refine problem framing.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required both to refine problem structure and to find the best solution.

Conventional human problem solving breaks down when confronted by the wicked problem. Humans usually throw two problem solving approaches at problems. One uses the Automatic System and the other uses the Reflective System. Thaler and Sunstein comment in Nudge:

The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking. When you duck because a ball is thrown at you unexpectedly, or get nervous when your airplane hits turbulence, or smile when you see a cute puppy, you are using your Automatic System. Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards (as well as puppies).

The Reflective System is more deliberate and self-conscious. We use the Reflective System when we are asked, “How much is 411 times 37?” Most people are also likely to use the Reflective System when deciding which route to take for a trip and whether to go to law school or business school. When we are writing this book we are (mostly) using our Reflective Systems, but sometimes ideas pop into our heads when we are in the shower or taking a walk and not thinking at all about the book, and these probably are coming from our Automatic Systems.

The Automatic System is what we in software engineering call legacy software. It’s the results of solutions to obvious problems that were so obvious that evolution hardwired them into our brains over eons. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s illustration of a “well-structured” problem is what happens when you see a leopard. Your Automatic System has arrived at the one clear solution: run away as fast as possible (a good option if, as this guy postulates, early humans could run as fast as 37 mph). The Automatic System is fast while the Reflective System is somewhat slower. The Reflective System is geared to the CACD’s Medium Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”. It’s good at problems where the desired endstate is clear but there’s more than one way to get there. Wicked problems, however, are too complex for Automatic responses and strain Reflective responses. A good working definition for a wicked problem is any problem that falls into the gap between evolved and Automatic responses that Reflective calculations haven’t filled.

It seems that wicked problems will only succumb to distributed problem solving where many heads are knocked together and thrown at the problem. This creates multiple lines of approach that crush the wicked problem between converging columns of adaption. Some would identify this happenstance with the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing but that’s a misreading. Most of the great paradigm shifts come from a few aggregating minds but as much of 90% of the upfront processing will be done by lesser minds with varying degrees of ability and effort. At the end, a few super aggregators will step in and finish the final formulation. At that the multitudes can look back and see that they had been whittling away at a giant problem that they didn’t even known was there. The solution to wicked problems is culture, a form of Lamarckian natural selection where attributes acquired in life can be passed on to others without transfer through direct biological interface (though that’s a matter of choice).

The question that we face is how best to conduct the concentric cultural attacks on the looming wicked problems we confront on personal, group, national, and world levels. Any such detached question is complicated by the problem that any solution to a wicked problem has political implications, meaning that it will shift power from one party to others. The airy detachment of pure intellectual debate will inevitably be befouled by appeals to the Automatic System since triggering Automatic responses is a cheap, powerful, and time-tested method for achieving power. However, political infighting, whether expressed as logrolling, politicking, or outright war, may only tangentially contribute towards solving the wicked problem in the most tangential way: by creating an even worse wicked problem than the existing wicked problem. Techniques of dialogue have changed little since the dawn of time. If rhetoric and precision guided munitions have more conversational impact than war cries and spears, it’s more of a change in quantity than quality. Violence and sophistry are part of the wicked problem’s definition and its eventual solution. However, their underbrush must be cleared to get at the wicked problem, especially if, as I’d argue, solving the wicked problem is primarily a distributed effort. As a communication problem, noise imposed by sender, recipient, and medium must be minimized as much as possible to enable clarity.

Rittel’s own solution to defeating the wicked problem was IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System. IBIS involves at minimum four elements:

• Questions
• Ideas
• Pros
• Cons

An IBIS map starts with a root question:

Root Question

A question can only be responded to with another question or with an idea. An idea is best seen as first a potential answer to the question and secondly a chance to evolve into further questions:

Questions and Answers

Pros and cons can only respond to ideas. Further questions can also respond to ideas:

Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons

Following those few principles, Rittel argued, even wicked problems could be mapped. A shared map would be capable of establishing a shared understanding, enabling distributed problem solving to begin. Actually doing the IBIS mapping requires skill; as the old Othello commercial said, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. There’s several approaches to utilizing IBIS for creating shared understanding. Rittel’s original version used pencil and paper, relics of the 1970s. Nowadays you can use Compendium, a free open source (LGPL) IBIS mapping tool in conjunction with techniques like dialogue mapping or argument mapping. Less structured approaches can be taken with techniques like mindmapping using free tools like Freemind or XMind or concept mapping using tools like Cmap or VUE. More structured approaches also exist but too much representational granularity leads inevitably to uses of words like ontology. IBIS is a nice balance between too little structure and too much.

How do you extend such an approach over a sufficient distribution space to generate solutions for wicked problems? That’s a question for another time.

Eye of a Needle

America now has a single, unified, cohesive grand strategy. It turns out that even a five year old or equivalent (like an NSC staffer) can understand it. As formulated by George Friedman of Stratfor:

America’s grand strategy is to be so big and so powerful that it escapes the consequences of its own stupidity.

The big question is what the best representation of the OODA Loop is: how does one explain Boyd to Grandma?

Came across this interesting version of the OODA loop that contains the full Boyd but keeps it simple enough to grasp. Rather than the dumbed down version like so:

Dumb it down

You get this:

Better OODA Loop

Definite improvement.

• War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge about your true desires.
• The giant caveat to the preceding definition is that war is also an enemy strategy intended to make you conform to the enemy’s desires when doing so is contrary to what you’d do if you possessed both the power to resist and sufficient knowledge about your enemy’s true desires.
• The nature of a war is determined by the nature of the desires pursued in a war, not by the nature of the power used in a war.
• The power used in war is quite vivid. It can easily overshadow the sometimes nebulous desires sought in war. Yet the more spectacular species of power used in war are not always present in war. In contrast, desire is always present.
• The essence of war is hostile intentions. Your intentions are hostile if you want to make others conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true desires. War is any action taken on the basis of such hostile intentions.
• The stage of war is set by hostile intentions but then the appropriate forms of power must be found to fulfill those intentions in order for hostile intention to become hostile realization. Hostile intentions come first. Hostile power follows.
• While hostile intentions can shift the nature of available power from forms of power that are less appropriate for pursuing a set of intentions to forms that are more appropriate, often the quality and quantity of desire must be adapted to the quality and quantity of the power available to pursue them.
• Since war is a strategy, its nature is highly dependent on the politics that employs it. The nature of politics, more specifically the nature of the internal division of power and the internal struggle for power, determines the nature of war.
• However, in turn, the nature of war will shape the nature of the politics that employs it.
• Politics is always an appallingly messy process and the guidelines it lays down for war are equal parts wishful thinking, cynical rhetoric, and timid hedging. This makes the process of strategic reconciliation problematic and directly affects the nature of war.
• As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power.
• As a political tool, war is a strategy intended to create a division of power in our favor that others would resist if they had the power to do so and possessed sufficient knowledge of our true desires.
• War impacts culture by changing the division of power, which in turn changes the priority of cultural desires. The scale of a war’s impact on culture is directly proportional to the scope of the desires sought by the combatants and the power they have at their disposal to pursue them. A war with limited ambitions would create very few cultural ripples while a war with grander ambitions could permanently shift or even stop a culture’s forward march.
• Culture, through the medium of politics, regulates war, a political instrument. It acts as a ratchet to increase or decrease the scope and intensity of the desires it seeks and the scope and intensity of the power used to pursue them, which in turn dictates the scope and intensity of any war pursued in the name of culture and the politics it produces.
• Since culture is the art of the unspoken assumption, much of war’s aim and execution is guided by unspoken and largely unconscious assumptions and default choices.
• Changed politics will result in changed culture.
• War, as both an expression and instrument of culture, will continue to disproportionately influence culture in ways that escape conscious observation.
• War is the ultimate human intergroup tournament. While all wars are intergroup tournaments, not all intergroup tournaments are wars. Only some intergroup tournaments meet the definition of war.
• A key action to take, while engaged in the intergroup tournament, is to target the other four mechanisms of adaption with influence and violence.
• Diversity generators are critical for creating the designed, engineered, or random adaptations that, when added together, allow you to adapt to the rigors of the intergroup tournament.
• However, too much diversity will cause you to fissure and split. There will be disorientation and indecision which will lead to inaction which will lead to maladaption.
• Speeding up the generation of diversity may rip you apart and send the various fragments on their way.
• The critical regulators of diversity are conformity enforcers. Conformity enforcers control how much diversity is tolerated within a community.
• Producing either stifling conformity or anarchic disarray is the aim of targeting a community’s conformity enforcement. If conformity enforces squeeze too tight, rigidity may set in and your adaptation will become sluggish and behind the curve. Taking the opposite approach, letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend to such an extent that incoherence is produced, than adaption will become disjointed and ill aimed.
• One of the most powerful targets to hit is inner-judges. Inner-judges have the power to rally a community to new heights of effort. If inner-judges think that things aren’t going so well, they can flick off the internal light switch and collapse the entire war effort from the inside. Enlisting them on your side, whether they’re conscious of having volunteered or not, is a key part of a combined strategy of victory. Inner-judges are a potential fifth column if turned in a negative direction. Thinning their ranks with violence is also an option.
• OODA loops, if they repeatedly produce losing adaptions, may have a inner-judge that starts to disrupt it internally, meaning that if it is under attack, it ends up fighting a two front war, one against the outer intergroup tournament and one internally against an inner-judge. The inner-judge, because it’s deeply embedded in the cycle, may be tougher to defeat.
• Since politics is the struggle for power, whether through the “other means” of war or not, resource shifters are a critical target. Some winning adaptions can be made to appear more winning so that they attract more power than they actually deserve. The distribution of power by resource shifters can be disrupted by slicing through supply lines and diverting power.
• War itself acts as a resource shifter, stealing from the loser to give to the victorious. The goal is to shift more power to yourself than is shifted away from yourself.
• War operates along a spectrum of power that falls between an absolute concentration of power at one extreme and an absolute absence of power at the other extreme.
• What separates one end of the spectrum from the other is energy and visibility.
• Energy is how much power it takes to make the enemy conform to our political desires while visibility is how easy it is for the enemy to gather knowledge we don’t want them to have.
• There’s a trade off between visibility and energy. The more energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the more visible it is. The smaller the amount of energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the less visible a form of strategic power is.
• War is a mixture of two forms of strategic power: violence and influence. In the middle between violence and influence is coercion, the strategic power we use to hurt the enemy until they stop resisting our desires. It’s an even mix of violence and influence, a recipe for moderate palates.
• Influence has low visibility and low energy while violence has high visibility and high energy.
• Influence takes many forms: diplomacy, propaganda, subversion, commerce, agitation, intelligence, education. However, the most elemental form of influence in war is deception, the strategic form of power used to distort enemy perceptions in ways that help us satisfy our desires.
• More depends on how you mix influence and violence due to the wild unpredictability of war.
• It may be that violence will eventually be resorted to when a community has the power to wage it. It often seems cheaper than compromise and easier than influence.
• The two are not mutually exclusive.The process of analysis and deduction open gaps of vulnerability where one group can penetrate another’s dissection of the world and disrupt or even dictate the trailing process of synthesis and induction. Violence can open the holes that influence needs to reach the inner mechanisms of enemies. Influence can make the breaking, killing, and maiming of violence easier.
• Strategic asymmetry in war results from one side orienting, aggregating, and compressing more successfully than the other side. War is a clash between compression algorithms.
• A point along the spectrum of power where you have blocked the enemy from finding a strategic advantage is a selected degree of control along that wavelength of the spectrum of power.
• War is not an attack on a lifeless mass. War is an attack on a living enemy and the one thing you quickly learn about the enemy is that he reacts.
• The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated. These strong feelings can distort the original cultural priorities and political goals that the strategy of war was supposed to achieve. Throw in chance and probability and you’ve created a volatile mix. Throughout history, many have poorly judged the impact of hostility and change in the strategy of war, especially when choosing when to use it and when not to use it.

• Tactics is the fifth and final software control loop on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, strategy, and operational art, tactics is an OODA loop.
• Tactics is the direct interaction of power and desire with the outside world.
• If tactical interaction leads to the successful pursuit of desire, than tactical adaption is successful. If tactical interaction fails, than tactical adaption is unsuccessful.
• There is nothing between tactics and the outside world. Once tactical action is taken, the outside world pushes right back. This leaves little time or space for deliberation.
• Tactics is the instrument by which operational art successfully arranges desire and power in time and space. If tactical interactions end successfully, operational art can make a successful arrangement. Such arrangements often require that opposition be cleared out of a certain space at a certain time.
• Tactical success and failure flow up the stack, making the chances for operational, strategic, political, and cultural success or failure either much greater or much reduced.
• Tactics needs the Automatic System more than the Reflective System because it has a greater demand for quick reaction.
• Since tactics is easier to reduce to routine and habit than politics, strategy, and operations, military thinkers such as Clausewitz considered tactics more of a science than an art. Principles can be derived from tactical examples that have some hope of application beyond a passing set of circumstances.
• A specific tactical implementation rapidly becomes obsolescent but the principles remain, when interpreted with caution, fairly consistent over time.
• Most obsessions about ongoing adaption are obsessions about tactics. Tactics are easy to see and easy to describe. Most daily interactions are tactical. Obsession with tactics leads to a shallow, short-term fixation on the easily visible and short term rather than the obscure and long-term of other control loops.

• The operational control loop is the fourth highest level software layer on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, and strategy, operational art is an OODA loop.
• Operational art arranges the prioritized desires of culture and the divisions of power made by politics, joined in a reconciliation mediated by strategy, in time and space.
• If this arrangement successfully pursues desires, operational adaption is successful. If not, operational adaption is unsuccessful.
• Operational art is the instrument of strategy, the means by which strategic reconciliation is made. Operational art moves desire and power into the arrangement that strategy determines will make a reconciliation between the two effective in realizing desire.
• Operational art experiences more friction and willful opposition from opposition than strategy, politics, or culture. It is far closer to the edge of survival and further from the luxury of abstraction than higher control loops on the stack. The more abstract notions of culture, politics, and strategy meet the real world with its real pressures. Abstractions begin to break down and the uncompressed mess of the outside world starts to leak in.
• Operational adaption is faster than cultural, political, or strategic adaption because feedback from the outside world comes faster.
• Operational art uses tactics to effect the best arrangement in time and space. It maneuvers desire and power to the point of contact with the outside world. Then tactics engages and interacts with the outside world.
• Operational methods can be visualized as lying along an operational spectrum, categorized by the concentration of power they involve. Methods that use a low concentration of power are found towards the left end of the spectrum, culminating in passive observation of the opponent. Methods that use higher concentrations of power are found to the right, culminating in the total annihilation of opposition.
• The operational spectrum can be seen as a controller knob. You start with white lies. After the white lies you turn the dial to to systematic fraud: propaganda, subversion, media. Further on, you reach posturing. Turning further, you reach threats and intimidation. Turn further and you reach hurt, actions which cause pain and coerce but do not necessarily destroy. Turn a bit further and you reach destruction of property, then the destruction of individuals, finally culminating at the end of the dial with annihilation of populations and the outside world, the expression of absolute violence.

• Strategy is the third highest software control loop on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture and politics, strategy is an OODA loop.
• Strategy is the reconciliation of the quantity and quality of cultural desire with the quality and quantity of the power available to achieve that cultural desire.
• Strategy plays the role of mediator. From one side, you have cultural desires loosely coupled to political power coming down. From the other side, pressure from the outside world are boiling up from control loops that are close to or in direct contact with the outside world.
• Sometimes strategy appears cohesive. Sometimes it appears to be disjointed. Most of the time, however, even if it has several flows, it all flows in one general direction.
• The balance between power and desire is constantly shifting and strategy must constantly adjust the quality and quantity of one to match the quality and quantity of the other.
• The reconciliation of power with desire will never be exact and many times will be fatally contradictory.
• Defining the quality and quantity of power and desire is difficult. Quality is always a fuzzy concept. The only test of quality is the trial of usage. Quantity is more exact but also prone to nebulousness.
• The effectiveness of a new reconciliation of power, desire, and outside pressures is measured in the favorable divisions of power it produces and the higher priority desires it satisfies.
• Strategy is a “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse” but politics is not “a tyrant”, able to dictate to strategy absolutely. Though strategy falls under the sway of politics, its twists and turns as it seeks reconciliation can generate effects that shape politics.
• Strategy is the instrument that a political participant uses to attract power towards their chosen cultural desires and deflect power from competing cultural desires.
• While politics is the instrument of culture, strategy is the instrument of politics: its nature is a direct reflection of the politics that employs it.
• The outside world is felt more strongly by strategy than by culture and politics.
• Strategy seeks a balance between violence, the absolute concentration of power, and influence, the fleeting mist of dispersed power.
• Influence is a strategy intended to apply control through physically intangible power.
• Violence is a strategy intended to impose control through physically tangible power
• The mixture of these two strategies can be found in specific strategies along the strategic spectrum:
  • Peace is widely dispersed power, all influence and no violence in its pure form.
  • Economics is largely influence with a touch more violence.
  • Government is equal parts violence and influence.
  • Central planning is mostly violence with a touch of influence
  • War is violence with very little influence in its purest form.
• Economics is a type of politics, a division of power. The type of economy used to accomplish a division of power is a strategy. Free market economies or command economies are strategies used by politics to divide power between desires.