Attachment security

Thanks to a large EU project on societal security, I have been reading up what we called the unexplored crevasses of  security. One of the big discoveries for me was the rich literature on attachment security
reminded by the Boris Cyrulnik, the impressive French popular writer
link to resilience,
talked on Laurent Ruquier (10/7/2012) about the serenity of a kid experiencing a bombing raid in a basement in the security of his closest family vs the fear of a kid that might be far away from the bombs but also from those securitizing links
also mentions the favellas in Rio:
when police is sent in, the main guys of the gangs have to show they are tough
now they send in soccer players, samba dancers, etc - create links, attachments

C'est  l'exemple  des favelas de Sao  Paulo au  Brésil, où  j'ai travaillé  : les enfants envoyaient  balader les psychologues, mais pas les guitaristes, les danseurs de samba ou  les footballeurs, avec lesquels  un  début de  lien  se  tissait. Avec cette méthode culturelle, le président Lula a  pacifié  50  %  des  favelas,  là  où  la  police avait échoué . Donc il y a du travail culturel à faire, il faut convaincre les hommes politiques que c'est possible.

The rise of the rest

"The decline of the West and the rise of the rest" has become a very popular one-liner amongs the kommentariat.

UK equivalent : ask the average Britton

but also other away of looking at this: the rest is becoming like the West. Which may have enormous implications for armed forces. right now, we are willing to do things in 'the rest' that we would never tolerate in 'the West'. e.g. strike and collateral damage.
we are still willing to use 'force' in the West when we feel that
but we don't fire live ammo - we use rubber bullets, tear gas, water canon

Just a thought on 'effective' defense. Think of us humans as a biological species. In the bigger scheme of things, we must be among the most vulnerable of all species. Not much natural 'force protection' - no armature, etc. Not much 'mobility' - just try outrunning a cheetah. Not very strong when compared to other primates or other much stronger species. Not all that big as you find out when you look in awe at an elephant or a giraffe. No real special weapons like venom, sharp teeth or claws, vicious horns, electric rays or any other types of weapons that nature has invented. And yet, the 'force', the capability bundle we have evolutionarily developed trumps all of these better protected, faster, bigger, intrinsically deadlier species. Might there not be a lesson in that for our defense organizations?
For those interested in this, I recommend this fascinating article in Scientific American.

The sad state of affairs in 'applied' security studies

 I always jealously look at articles in other theoretical disciplines (say in the 'life' sciences) that often synoptically summarize the main hypotheses for phenomena they are struggling with in some box with the authors in the left column, and their findings (which are often contradictory, especially when you're dealing with small-N research) in the other. But how many of those do we have in say international relations theory? The same applies to the more applied side of strategic studies. In many fields that are - or at least should be, if strategy were really about 'big picture' isues -  of interest to us (say economic policies, or social policy or even education, health policy), international organizations produce much empirically-based comparative research. I am, for instance, a great fan and avid reader of the various forms of 'benchmarking' work that the OECD, the World Bank and the IMF do in these various areas. Just trying to 'dissect' various policies that countries follow in those areas, trying to come up with various (input, throughput AND output - and sometimes even outcome) indicators and then seeing if we can somehow map all of those in a search for waht seems to work (under which circumstances, etc.) We have absolutely nothing of the sort in the field of international security. NATO has no mandate to do so (although some of us are trying to change this) and has no real 'in-house think tank anyway - only some embryonic fragments exist throughout the organization, such as in the Policy Planning Staff in the Private Office of the Secretary-General; in the newly created 'Emerging Security Challenges Division' within the and within ACT 

 the EU might (but not in the defense realm, and even if it did, it would not likely have the guts to include non-EU states in the comparisons). And the OSCE or the UN are hardly worth mentioning in this context. [Incidentall, given the current state of international governance I still think that the OECD would be perfect for this job - PRECISELY because it has so little 

Reconceptualizing security within the EU

We recently finished an interesting piece of work in the framework of a large-scale European Union-funded collaborative research project “European Security Trends and Threats In Society” (ETTIS). We essentially downloaded thousands of articles from ALL academic disciplines that deal with how security is defined, what dimensions it has and how it can be dealt with. I have been in the field of security studies for about 25 years now, but some of the insights we found in other disciplines were just eye-opening (and mouth-watering!)...

RAND / rational choice / personalities

I have for some reason always felt closer to (even if less well-versed in) economists than to political scientists. The rational choice paradigm that was so dominant at UCLA when I was doing my Ph.D. work there is certainly to a large extent responsible for that. But also a number of personal encounters with. When I came back to RAND Santa Monica in 2000(for what unfortunately only turned out to be one year), I happened to be in a room in the old 5-floor building that was only a few doors away from the office of Tom Schelling - who would go on to win the 2005 Nobel prize winner in the field of Economics. Schelling, whose did much of his seminal work at RAND in the 50s that he published when he went to Harvard as 'Strategy of Conflict' apparently maintained some affiliation with RAND for much of his career.

expertise and interests were extremely broad who still spent some time at RAND as a visiting scholar. He gave a talk on smoking and on climate change. Also discussed with him

Tom Schelling . I knew his primarily as a military strategist and a applied game theorist, but that summer I found out a number of his other interests. This had a big impact on me - taking some of the most important 'strategic topics' and just applying the full range of analytical tools + 'big picture'

6 by 4 index cards, methodically surgically went through the various arguments pro and con. evidence based, (pluri!)theoretically conversant - but most of all creativity-inspired and policy-focused. And most important of all - in readable English.

"a central figure in the Rand "oral tradition" that gave shape to strategic thinking as it emerged in the 1960s and--it is still about all we have--the 1970s." - never heard about this "oral tradition" but looking back I have to admit that that 'oral tradition' at RAND may have taught me more than I ever realized. The old RAND building had been constructed by to maximize the probability of chance encounters.

pdf

And indeed - whether by design or by default - that did tend to happen.

'military strategist' - systems analysis "The germination date was August, 1945; and the movement reached a kind of maturity from which it never recovered, when it moved in 1961

into the Establishment, the Departments of State and Defense. The idea stage was about over then, although books reflecting earlier thought and work continued to appear in the early 1960s."

“mat discourse,” see Kubo (2006).Kubo, Michael, Constructing the Cold War Environment: The Architecture of the RAND Corporation, 1950–2005, thesis, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2006.

This reminds me of Jack Hirshleifer

More roots

Three roots for *ar
*h2er-
*h1er-
*h3er-

Kinetic capabilities

I have referred in this blog multiple times to the growing unease - among military and non-military people alike - about  our current capability portfolio. I think the discussions about the term 'kinetic capabilities' are an interesting example of this debate. My own take in this debate for the past few years has been that we just need a better balance between 'kinetic' and 'non-kinetic' capabilities. Upon reflection, I will now start talking about 'old kinetic' (industrial) and 'new kinetic' (information-age) capabilities.