'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].