Ecosystem (forward) innovation

This is a little blurb I wrote with some personal ideas on the debate on innovation which we are having within TNO through our new Strategy and Change program. The reason I am posting it here (besides the fact that I have no real time to work it out into a real publication anyway) is that some of this thinking also fits in very nicely with the much more broader and far-sighted approach to 'armed force' that I am pleading for in this blog. 

Post-ismism

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 
(what I sometimes jokingly call 'ismism') in the field of International Relations Theory, that are amusingly debated in a recent issues of International Studies Quarterly. Yet there can be little doubt that the isms still persist, and perhaps nowhere more than in the field of defense and security analysis, which for some bizarre reason has always tended to be dominated by what is know - in one of the most spectacular misnomers of all time - as the 'realist' camp. Not hindered by much knowledge about international political economy (or frankly - of modern international history), this field has always displayed a remarkably persistent tendency to ignore the powerful linkages between the various dimensions of the international system (of course economics, but also demographic, legal, sociological, etc.). And in those instances where it DID take some of them into consideration (like economics), to interpret those in an almost caricature-like 'vulgar' realist way.  In the much more 'linear' and less interconnected world, relative growth rates could indeed be interpreted 

The hybris of strategic analysis

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

Joint Ops 2030 receives NATO's 2011 Scientific Achievement Award

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.

Power and capability planning

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?

Strategic operations research

Rightsizing the politics of defense

It is becoming increasingly clear that the nation-state is not longer the 'optimal unit' to deal with many defense issues. This is certainly the case for smaller and mid-sized countries, but arguably even for the larger ones. When 'national defense' essentially meant territorial 'self-defense', the centrality of the nation state in defense matters was self evident, even almost tautological. But for many developed countries this is no longer the case.

Both components of the expression 'national defense' ('national' and 'defense') are continuing to evolve. 'National defense' has gradually morphed into a broader concept of 'national security'. And as the international system has become ever more interwoven and 'complex', the concept of 'national' is also far less obvious than it used to be.

For a long time planning defense was just a purely 'national' matter. Nations did of course enter into alliances for various purposes and varying amounts of time, but forward defense planning remained essentially a national activity. Since the end of World War II and the advent of the Cold War, at least some NATO countries (and to some extent  - but in a different way - also Warsaw Pact countries) added a fairly thin layer of multinational defense planning on top of their national efforts. The NATO defense planning process represents probably the most developed form of multinational defense planning - even though its actual impact    on national defense decisions has been fairly disappointing throughout NATO's existence. The European Union has recently also become somewhat involved in defence planning, but the added value of this additional effort has so far (unfortunately) been marginal.

Confronted with the current fiscal tsunami that is starting to hit our National Defense Organizations, nations can essentially head in three different directions.
More multinationalism
A first option is that nations would opt for a more systematic multinational approach. This would appl

Capabilities and the second Arab awakening

This is probably the

An insider's view on NATO defense planning

As I mentioned in another posting, defense planning is changing from a narrow focus on just the 'force' (units and platforms) to a broader sense of anything than can help us in achieving our defense (and security) objectives. So what used to be called 'force planning' within NATO is now called 'defense planning'. A few years back, a NATO colleague handed me a hilarious little blurb that had been written by some NATO force planner. There was no classification on it, so I see no reason not to post it. I cannot source it, although the Brigitte Bardot reference suggests it was probably written sometime in the late 60s or 70s; while the wording and the sneer at the type of English used may point to a British (or American) officer. For those of you with suspiscious minds (and let's face it - that does tend to be somewhat of a professional hazard in our line of work) let me assure you that I had absolutely nothing to do with this!!! J

Grammars of power - some personal recollections

A good colleague and friend of mine at HCSS (Tim Sweijs - War Studies at King's College) and I (with a number of talented interns at HCSS)  have been doing some interesting work on 'the future of power'. Few concepts are more central to international relations (and international security) than this one. And yet, even this central concept suffers from the same definitional and conceptual imprecision that bedevils so many other concepts in international relations. One would hope that a more 'applied' policy-think tank like HCSS would be able to rely on cumulative theoretical knowledge built up by academia [I will definitely return to this topic in more detail in subsequent blog entries]. It is true that much has been written on 'power' in the (remarkably insular) discipline of political science. But I have always felt that this literature still misses a number of  important 'dimensions' of power. This is especially the case in the field of international security, in which the realist tradition - and its particular view on power - has been dominant for decades now. We were also never able to find a nice synoptic overview of the various 'forms' of power and what we actually know about their relative effectiveness. As I define 'armed force' as essentially a bundle of any (useful) capabilities that can be applied to exercise raw power in the pursuit of certain goals, and as I am also convinced that there are many un(der)explored recesses of power, we set out to do our homework on this topic.

Capability taxonomies can kill

The power of taxonomies never ceases to amaze me. We use a lot of (explicit AND implicit) taxonomies and other types of classifications in defense planning - as we of course also do in other walks of life. Most of us are not even aware that we put things into various mental 'boxes' for all sorts of purposes ("she's one/not one of us"; "he is attractive/not attractive; etc.). Some of the more geeky amongst us might be more conscious of this, but might still think these categories are innocent, 'objective' mental 'aids' that just assist us in moving from the more abstract to the more concrete. My own take on this is that the taxonomies we currently use in defense are among the main culprits why we have the 'armed forces' we have now, and why we have too much of certain types of military capability and too litle of others.

'Command and control'

As I am trying to get some definitional issues out of the way in these entries, let me also add an etymological excursion into the original meaning of the words ‘command’ and ‘control’ – which in some sense can be seen as the ‘glue’ that keeps the ‘capability packages’ together in the pursuit of the political goals.

Some differences between planning under certainty and uncertainty

	Planning under relative certainty	Planning under deep uncertainty
Emphasis on	Deliberateness over emergentness	Reverse
Nature of strategy	Intentionally designed	Gradually shaped
Nature of strategy formation	Figuring out	Finding out
Formation process	Formally structured and comprehensive	Unstructured and fragmented
Formation process steps	First think then act	Thinking and acting intertwined
Focus on strategy as a	Pattern of decisions (plan)	Patterns of action (behavior)
Decisionmaking	Hierarchical	Political
View of future	Forecast and anticipate	Partially unknown and unpredictable
Posture towards the future	Make commitments, prepare for the future	Postpone commitments, remain flexible
Implementation focused on	Programming (organizational efficiency)	Learning (organizational development)
Strategic change	Implemented top-down	Requires broad cultural and cognitive shifts

Joint Operations 2030

I have already referred to the NATO Research and Technology Organization's  3-year long Long-Term Scientific Study on Joint Operations 2030.  The Alliance had done studies like this in the 90s for the individual services (air, land, sea), but this was the first study to broaden the scope to include not only the 'joint' realm suggested in the title, but also the broader 'comprehensive' realm. Being 'owned' by the (15!) member states who decided to participate in it (and thus committed resources to it) and not by the Alliance as a whole, the study was thus blissfully unbeholden to the various restrictions that continue to be imposed on NATO-wide planning work in this field.

Capabilities

Capabilities are at the heart of any defense effort. Getting them ‘right’ has been, is, and will remain a fiendishly difficult task. For better or worse, defense organizations go into any crisis with the capabilities they have – not the ones they need or would like to have. We have come a long way in certain areas of capability development, as illustrated by recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But these very same experiences also show that most of us still are far from getting it ‘right’.

Defense and epochal change

More and more defence organizations claim that the future security environment within which ‘armed forces’ will operate is becoming ever more volatile. Many recent defence foresight efforts (JOE in the US, Strategic Trends and the recent UK Green Paper in the UK, the French Livre Blanc, NATO ACT’s Multiple Futures, etc.) have emphasized this profound contextual uncertainty. There is nothing particularly new about this. An analysis of many countries' defense white papers over the past few decades [and my colleague Paul Van Hooft is doing some work on this at the University of Amsterdam] would probably show this to be a constant: any 'new' threat analysis typically claims that some new trends create more threats and/or uncertainty. 

But none of those exercises explicitly embrace the new, potentially much more fundamental (and unsettling) 'background change' of what we might call ‘epochal uncertainty'.

Jeremy Azrael

[I mentioned in my first post that I would also deal in this blog with some Russian/(post-) Soviet issues. Here is a piece I wrote upon hearing that one of RAND's most influential Soviet/Russia gurus, Jeremy Azrael, had passed away on March 19, 2009. People interested in the field of Soviet/Russian studies might still get a kick out it. Or not.] 

Military technology

Having just posted some musings on the etymological roots of the word 'armed force', I also want to add a few thoughts about the concept of (military) technology. As with 'armed force', when we think of 'military technologies', we think of the 'hard' technologies that we have grown accustomed to - many of them industrial-age, a few ICT-age. But the story behind these two words may again prove counterintuitive to many.

The nature of 'Armed Force'

In work we have been doing at HCSS/TNO we have taken a closer look at the historical roots of many words we regularly use in the strategic community.

Making the leap...

As I have received some 'sabbatical' time from HCSS to write a book about defense planning, I decided to finally make the leap and to start a blog. I have been in the field of 'strategic studies' for about a quarter of a century now (yikes) - mostly at places that enjoy excellent reputations in this field. For ten years I worked at the RAND Corporation - on both sides of the Atlantic - and I am still very much a RANDite at heart ("improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis"). I've also worked at a number of European think tanks - the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Germany (which was created after WWII to be the new Germany's 'RAND'); what is now the European Institute for Security Studies in Paris; and for the past 7 years in the TNO ecosystem - the least well known of these places, even though it is by far the largest, with 4000 scientists of which about a quarter work in the fields of defense and security. In 2007 TNO created the The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, where I now work to deal with the growing demand for strategic-level analytical support within the Dutch government and beyond.  [I certainly plan to return to my views on some of these institutes in future blog entries].