The SysAdmin grows
Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 2:22AM POST: On the Hunt in Baghdad, by Michael J. Totten, December 15, 2008
Exchange:
"One night I asked Captain Looney which he prefers: kinetic fighting or nation-building?
"I vastly prefer this," he said. He meant nation-building. Killing people does not make the would-be pacifist happy.
"Some soldiers tell me they prefer fighting," I said.
"They're immature," he said"
Perfect example of why I always describe the Leviathan work as a young man's game and SysAdmin as requiring the more experienced hands.
But it's also an example of why I am always bemused by the expectation of some readers that unless the SysAdmin is declared extant one day in some hoopla, then the idea hasn't reached some fruition.
As I have told people from the start, I make the argument to both cite ongoing and long-term (already) change and to give voice to that evolution.
So when people say, "Has Washington decided to create your SysAdmin force?" I am a bit puzzled.
The community has been building this force for a couple of decades now. It simply emerges in people, tactics, doctrine, regulations, etc., slowly over time in response to the build-up of operational experience.
In short, it's not my proposal. It's a description of an evolving and emerging reality.
Captain Looney is an example of that evolution. I've met and interacted with thousands just like him over the course of the last two decades.
(Thanks: Rob Johnson)
Reader Comments (7)
The larger difficulty will be to apply that kind of change, that "new code" at the operational level of war that institutionalizes changes to systems capability selection processes, so we can have tools tailored for the war at hand instead of tools tailored for the fulda gap. Put another way, the larger difficulty will be to apply war planning processes (and their inherent risk evaluations) to acquisition priorities.
SECDEF has called for reprioritization, most clearly in his hiring practices and in the FA article. Strengthening of the urgent needs processes relative to deliberate planning helps new systems for Iraq, and now Afghanistan, do an "end run" around the big-war programmers who resist building, as John Boyd used to say, "snowmobiles." Speed and maneuver warfare apply at the operational level of war, in requirements definition, as much as at the tactical level of war. No one expected Mr. Young to field a dash, an MRAP II, or issue requirements for an all-terrain MRAP, but we did all three in quick succession while fielding the 70% solution, base-case MRAP. That Counter-EFP MRAP was only fielded a few months before it saved three Generals from an 800lb car bomb. Good thing we "iterated" our OODA loop for the MaxxPro Plus just a little faster than the enemy got to the Generals, the Colonel and the crew of that vehicle. In 4GW, one key tactical victory reverberates.
It's interesting, tangentially, to see John Boyd talk of "creative destruction" in military settings, and to see Clayton Christensen use those same words in the business world of strategic technology analysis. Just as biologists study fruit flies because of their fast lifecycle, just as Christensen studied disk drive industry because it was the fruit flies of business, so business strategy is the "fruit flies" of warfare. same principles, much faster lifecycle. Its not for nothing that Boyd's studies led him to the Toyota Production System.
SECDEF has told us that hot wars are unlikely in his risk analysis. But if we have to fight a hot war some place, we will go all-in and mobilize industry to pop out M1A1 tanks, F35s and F22s as fast as we are popping out cameras and MRAPs today. Until such time, long-range cameras, weaponized UAVs, MRAPs, Biometric census technologies and other forms of "the many and the cheap" are the way we will have to continue to have to go.
When Bush 2 tasked the Pentagon with Afghanistan and Iraq without WWIII size resources, the establishment learned that their big war resources and methods could provide positive but limited results, and few long term solutions. It is better that they got those insights in a regional rather than Gap wide situation.
The Leviathan crowd had such a strong influence on promotions and assignments that the whole military had to have a significant experience of their limits before accepting a Transformation to SysAdmin methods and resources. Without that experience they would have constantly challenged the Transformation and focused on its limited near term successes as evidence of strategic failure.
Words count so I would use Transformation rather than Creative Destruction outside Tom's clan to avoid raising hackles unnecessarily and wasting critical time. The potential losers from a pending Transformation always see the threat to them before larger communities see the potential benefits.
At some point we need to get works like Great Powers in the hands of military and business students instead of just being a teacher resource. The 'hot button' language Tom uses in the early topic introductions to get the attention and interest of his target audiences may undermine and distract such students, particularly if they, or family and friends, experienced pain as we learned the limitations of the fading Great Power global military and economic program methods. Maybe the publisher can produce a student use version in a few years with a few toned down introductory phrases.
I agree we need to retain the capability to restore a 'hot war' capability on short notice, like we did for WWII. But the strategy, tactics and technologies will have to also be 21st Century oriented rather than just updates of 20th Century ones. So keep funding DARPA, ONR, NIST and other activities that identify, promote and test those practical Flash Gordon things.
Who knows? After 18 years of face-to-face briefings of thousands upon thousands of military personnel, I might just be a pretty decent judge of what kind of language they can handle.
My experience of the last half-decade tells me they have no problem listening to criticism of Bush-Cheney.
In the early 1990s I was using sources like NIST, DARPA and ONR to show them how IT applications, global economic networks, and mass customization by computer processes instead of human manufacturing were changing the economy and military ops and logistics, and that they were vulnerable if they did not adapt. They listened, read and disregarded after doing a paper because the functions were not big in their existing world, and it required significant inquiry into areas without a lot of early reward.
Then, a more experienced instructor said I should 'leak' examples of change and let them discover the background sources. So I got copies of source document for local school library, showed short movies of applications of new techniques, and made cryptic comments in presentations on existing methods. Usually, one or two students got interested, checked the library, introduced the new topics in class discussions, and decided to write papers. That got class interest more than I could.
I had similar problems trying to get military information officers and civil chambers of commerce interested in the topics even though their bases and towns were participating in early applications of the new methods. But, after all, Robert Reich wrote several books and countless articles on similar topics, and later could not get his Dept. of Labor to adequately adapt. I guess he did not have the equivalent of a Captain Looney to break the ideological ice.
The new ongoing transformations in foreign affairs, military missions and methods, and worker and investor roles in global economy dwarf the transformations I tried to communicate.