Large language models, epochal change and true strategic policy innovation

I think that we, poor old oligophrenic ‘homo sapiens’,  have been using far too little strategic creativity in many of the big picture discussions we are having about creating ‘value’. That applies especially to public value creation in fundamentally important policy areas such as education, the environment, health care, mobility, etc. But it also applies to the field I am spending most of my time on: foreign, security and defense policy. The new large language models (like GPT-4) may actually prove uniquely helpful in broadening the strategic aperture of these policy debates, but only if we prod them to move beyond their training material.

Building and sharing a knowledge base on Russian international acting and thinking

Great powers still matter disproportionately. This truism implies that the world would greatly benefit from getting a better analytical handle on what really makes these ever surprising geopolitical entities - first and foremost China, but to us Europeans still also Russia (and increasingly even the United States) - tick. Today, that analysis still remains very much in the hands of what I like to call 'prima donnas' (and I am of course as 'guilty', as many of the colleagues I'm 'charging' here). Many of us have been studying these countries intensively for decades. Many of us have come to different conclusions about what these actors have been doing, about what is really makes them 'tick'. Many of us write articles, reports and books; we advise decision-makers; we present and discuss our views at conferences; we are active on social media; we interact with more traditional media. Very few of us, however, have been trying to build a dispassionate, comprehensive, rigorous and creative knowledge base. Georgia Tech and HCSS have been engaged in such an effort for the past two years, and we would like to invite interested colleagues to reach out to us to join us in this effort.

"Le pessimisme est d'humeur; l'optimisme est de volonté" [Propos sur le bonheur (1928) d'Emile-Auguste Chartier, dit Alain]

I heard this great expression today on my favorite French weekly talk-show "On n'est pas couché". It means (loosely translated): "Pessimism is a matter of mood; optimism is a matter of will".

While this is one of those wonderful aphorisms that make you go 'hmmmm', I personally think it is not entirely accurate. Humans (at least some of us 😊) appear to have a certain innate disposition towards optimism as well. But overall, I do think this expression nicely captures one of those evolutionary characteristics of good old sapiens: that the worrywarts may historically have had certain advantages over their lucky-go-happy counterparts. The role that our amygdala, for instance, plays in our brain, may very well be the anatomical incarnation of that particular disposition. But fortunately (from my point of view) our optimistic inclinations - 'the better angels in our nature', in the expression borrowed from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address by Steven Pinker in his wonderful 2011 book http://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature ) - also survived evolution. And I think that they may increasingly be turning into an asset rather than a liability. But yes, it sometimes does require some 'guts' to activate our brains' optimistically inclined synaptic connections these days. Especially in 'my' professional environment, where gloom and doom seems to be even more en vogue than ever.

This year's HCSS contribution to the Dutch government's Strategic Monitor 2017 (http://hcss.nl/report/volatility-and-friction-age-disintermediation), which was presented last week to to the public and to various government departments, tries to provide a more balanced look at what is happening in the world, what it means, and what we can do about it.

Our monitoring effort, based on – yet again – a number of new datasets and visualization tools, shows a mixed picture. We document growing assertiveness and dangerous brinkmanship by (a few) great powers; shifting global geodynamics in which Europe is still potentially quite influential, but doesn’t manage to live up to the potential in reality; growing conflict numbers in certain categories; increasing volatility in the international system (and we even developed a – still largely experimental – indicator (the HCSS VIM-index) to measure this). But we also show what we call ‘the other side of the violence coin’, where a number of technological and economic trends are continuing to empower and connect and improve the lives of many millions of individuals in what used to be called the billion bottom.

Our main (contrarian) interpretation of what we are witnessing around us is that what we are seeing is not 'just' the return of populism, not 'just' the fragilization of the international institutional rules-based system of global governance that we had grown accustomed to since the Second World War; not 'just' the backlash against liberalism and globalization by the segments of our populations that have been (read: that 'we' have allowed to become) left behind. We argue that we may be witnessing a much more profound global transformation in which some of the 'social technologies' that dominated the industrial age (the 'company'; 'government', 'state-based international organizations', etc.) are increasingly coming under pressure. In some sense, these were just the 'middle men' that our societies invented in order to leverage the revolutionary physical technologies that became available in the industrial age. In a process of 'disintermediation', we are now increasingly starting to cut out these middle men. Think of platform companies like Airbnb or Uber competing the hell out of hotel chains and taxi companies. Think of Tesla trying to sell fully electric cars surpassing car dealerships. But also think of Putin or ISIS targeting individuals in our societies in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

The conclusion the report draws from all of this for our defense and security organizations is that we may have to start rethinking the way in which we can achieve our defense and security objectives in a radically different and (hopefully) more effective and sustainable way. Our political systems, our international organizations, our government structures, but also our security forces and our armed forces may increasingly have to start rethinking who they are, what they do, and how they do it. Their private sector equivalents are increasingly morphing themselves into platform businesses with thriving ecosystems around them that manage to capture far more economic value – for themselves AND for their – often totally new and much smaller – ecosystem partners - than any of their more ‘pipeline’-like counterparts have ever been able to do. In the words of IBM’s CEO Ginni Rometty, they are becoming increasingly much more B2I (‘business to individual’) than B2B (‘business to business’) or B2G (‘business to government’) or B2C (‘business to consumer’ – in a transactional sense’). Should we start thinking along analogous lines for our defense and security organizations? Is it conceivable that they might be able to generate superior (defense and security) value for (defense and security) value by assuming more of a platform role? A platform that ‘nudges’ a far more heterogeneous set of sensors and effectors throughput the defense and security ecosystem to start generating ‘security value’ in different ways? Much earlier in the conflict cycle (prevention) and with much more of a focus on stimulating the agents of resilience – the healthy fibers of our society that abhor gratuitous radicalism. violence and conflict - than in ‘only’ combatting the agents of conflict? Using ways that are as different from the ‘old’ ways as Tesla is from the big-three in Detroit in global mobility? As ‘P4’ (Personalized, Predictive, Preventive, Participatory) medicine is from our current more traditional health care systems?

The (downside and upside) risk space in terms of defense and security is widening, deepening, and flipping. Our defense and security organizations still have to be able to contribute to the stabilization of some of Europe’s fragile neighbors from the Western Sahara to Belarus – hopefully in more sustainably successful ways than we have been able to do for the past 20 years. They still have to be able to intervene in crises where we feel that both established and emerging global standards (genocide, territorial aggression, other crimes against humanity, etc.) are being transgressed. They once again also have to be able to defend our own alliance borders against potential high-end conventional and nuclear threats. And on top of all of this, they also have to be able to keep our populations safe from terrorist, cyber, influence. AI, etc. threats. That already represents a significant deepening and widening parts of the risk space. But they - in our opinion- should also increasingly start thinking about how they might be able to bolster the 'positive' side of the security coin, which we risk ignoring by being so transfixed on the prophets of gloom and doom. There are still myriad positive developments taking place in this real - and we suggest that any defense and security organization that would be bold enough to start developing some capabilities in that area may gain some competitive advantage in both a coalitional context and vis-a-vis potential opponents. 

In our assessment, the current financial-economic and political-economic realities of European defense budgets - even in Central Europe - are unlikely to move upward as much as they may have to in order to adequately cover all of these trends within the traditional (industrial-age) paradigm. We also emphasize that the political focus on the input side of our defense value proposition (e.g. % of GDP spent on defense) is unlikely to provide the right incentives to improve the actual output (let alone the impact) of our defense and security efforts - and it may even work perversely. If our defense and security organizations have to do more, with only marginally more money, and if they seem unlikely to be able to do so within the current defense and security paradigm - then how can we possibly we square the circle? In our report, we argue that this can only be done by truly changing the paradigm. We are greatly encouraged by the strong leadership that both the Chief of Defense and the Minister of Defense in the Netherlands have displayed in catalyzing the coalescing of a defense and security ecosystem during the Future Force Conference 2017, where 1200 participants started giving real meaning to the concept. A large number of very concrete follow-on activities are already in the pipeline now to push this initiative even further - at both a whole-of-government AND an whole-of-ecosystem level. 

Europe took the lead in 'reimagining' defense and security in the industrial age. That age was jump-started in Europe, with the United Kingdom in the lead, and various parts of the continent following suit. These countries' forward leaning stakeholders, in both competition and cooperation with each other, jumped on the new both physical and social  technological innovations that were emerging in the transition to the industrial age to put themselves ahead of the pack. Europe may no longer be at the forefront of many technological developments as the world is transitioning to a post-industrial age. But it is still well positioned. And its political economy of defense may still be somewhat less beholden to various legacy lobbies than is the case in various other parts of the world. We therefore submit that Europe might still have a fighting chance to navigate the transition to a post-industrial incarnation of 'armed force' more elegantly than many other. Ironically, the current Zeitgeist may actually provide a unique impulse in that direction. Some argue that the current undeniable turbulence in the world system means that Europe has to 'wake up' from its (unreal) dream, and has to start behaving again like we did in the past 2 centuries: "standing up for ourselves";  "negotiating from strength", etc. 

The 2017 HCSS contribution to the strategic monitor of the Dutch government suggests an alternative course of action., One that does not just 'remember the future' (as our brains are wired to do), but (once again) creatively shapes the future. Daring to think that not only our security environment might change, but that also 'we' will have to change, that 'we' will have to start doing different things, with different capabilities and with different operational (and strategic) concepts.   . (Dutch) (A)rmed forces as the catalysts of a broader defense and security ecosystem that may offer us a better (fighting!) chance to generate defense and security value for those who live near and with us.

"Pessimism is a matter of mood; optimism is a matter of will". We are not predestined to relive the 1930s - European nationalism/populism/fascism/corporatism; the 'Bloodlands'; Stalin's repressions; 'Munich', etc. Or even the Concert of Europe of the 19th century - which did ultimately lead to three unusually bloody intra-European wars in 1867, 1914 and 1940 . Let alone the terrible fratricidal European wars that preceded the Treaties of Westphalia, The future is ours to shape, As was the case at Westphalia. As was the case in Versailles. As was the case after WWII. The fundamental vectors (Phänomenologie des Geistes) that were described in Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' are being contested, But they do linger on. Despite appearances, liberal democracies still have certain unparalleled advantages. Deepmind is in London and the startup scene in Europe (Berlin,. Amsterdam  is vibrant like never before. Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Intel, LinkedIn, McAfee, Netflix, Oracle, Paypal, Roku, Salesforce, Symantec, Twitter, Yahoo, etc. are in Silicon Valley. Many of these companies are disruptively transforming the spaces they operate in. The same cannot be said for defense and security. In our opinion, any open-eyed European monitoring effort should suggest that this - the ecosystem: our (uniquely powerful) own,  but also our opponents' - is the current center of gravity of our planning/design efforts. 

Going Back to the Roots: A Meta-Epochal Etymological Glossary of 'Military' Terms

The Military and the 'Kill Chain'

Many discussions about defense and 'the military' assume that 'killing' lies at the heart of the profession. I find that assumption not only strange, but wrong. The reason why we have armed forces is to sustainably achieve our defense and security objectives through some capability bundle that (hopefully) provides excellent value for money.  'Force' clearly needs to be part of that capability bundle.  But there are many ways of instantiating, actuating force.

Let us assume that we can, at times, identify 'evil incarnate'. A person or force so demonstrably vile that 'the public good' would agree it should be stopped. Even in a clearcut case like this one, why would the physical annihilation of that person or force be the optimal course of action? The person, it is true, would no longer be able to pursue his (and let's face it: this is the most dominant gender in this category) 'evil' intent. This may arguably even be a 'net gain' for the international community. But the 'kill' will also trigger strong negative reactions from relatives, friends, like-minded people. More importantly, from my point of view, this particular course of action deprives his victims as well as all of us from the salubrious (and potentially cathartic) process of 'legal discovery'. [We have a quite wonderful word in Dutch for this: 'rechtsvinding' - literally 'finding what's right'. Which precedes rechtsschepping and rechtstoepassing - the actual creation and application of law. The German corollary 'Urteilsfinding' is already too focused on the actual trial; as is 'legal discovery'].

It may therefore be more appropriate - not from a legal, not from an ethical, but from a strictly security-pragmatic point of view - to contemplate alternative courses of action. One of the most attractive ones I can identify would be to identify such potential cases, to obtain a 'warrant' to track them, find them, and bring them before a court of law. Killing the perpetrator, in this 'due process' would also kill the rechtsvinding. But incapacitating this person or force, extracting it from the conflict space and bringing it to a neutral space where 

Think of the conflict denial effect (it's more than just prevention, it's the forceful denial of conflict) effect. If the international community, pursuant to a professional, traceable, non-politicized, probabilistic analysis based on a number of clear (politically agreed upon) criteria (as, say, is the standard in modern national legal jurisdictions), would decide such a course of action would be warranted, it could then intervene before the conflict breaks lose.  

Think of the conflict escalation dominance effect - international 'adult supervision' could at any given moment call for a 'time out' in any conflict and 'force' (armed force!)/'nudge'/induce the parties to a conflict to pursue alternative ways of achieving their objectives. 

Maybe even most importantly, think of the deterrent effect of such a course of action. Any individual or group of individuals that would be a party in any conflict would at any given moment in time throughout a possible crisis escalation dynamic realize that his/her actions would be subject to global public scrutiny based on globally recognized principles of international 'law'. The likely proliferation of . 

Building new datasets for foreign and security policy analysis

I have long been very frustrated about the lack of a systematic empirical basis for our analysis of foreign and security policy. Newspapers, with their many well-known biases, essentially dictate what 'facts' are and 'analysts' and 'scholars' then cherry-pick these 'facts' to buttress whatever theory, ideology, etc. they espouse.  A number of new datasets and tools hold great promise to revolutionize this state of affairs. 

Capability-Based Planning: The Fight Continues...

Dr. Ben Taylor, Team Leader of Strategic Planning Operations Research at Canada's DRDC has authored an interesting new piece that outlines some of the main tenets of what I have called the TTCP school of capability-based planning. It builds on a 2011 TTCP meeting in Ottawa I had the pleasure to attend. The paper is called 'Analysis Support to Strategic Planning' and has now been approved for unlimited release. Since I have not been able to find a copy on the internet (yet), I am taking the liberty of making it available on my blog and of adding a few personal thoughts.

I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.

Stephan's Top-10 Book Recommendations for Defence and Security Planning

Paul Davis
Beinhocker
Taleb
Zolli & Healy

European Defence Agency's First-Ever War Game

From June 4-6, the European Defence Agency (EDA) will conduct its first ever war game in The Hague. The game will stress-test EDA's current Capability Development Plan against a stretching set of scenario ensembles. HCSS and TNO are the core team that was contracted by EDA to assist in the preparation and execution of this war game, which we called ECAPAG (European Capability Assessment Game). This table-top exercise will bring together participants from EDA’s participating Member States as well as from EU entities like the European Union Military Committee and the Crisis Management & Planning Directorate. HCSS developed a method to derive a set of scenarios from a large volume of foresight studies in a traceable way that can also be regularly updated. HCSS, in close cooperation with TNO, also formulated a computer-assisted game design that allows to translate these scenario ensembles into capability trends for each of the tasks described in the EDA's Generic Military Task List as well as for possible new tasks that may emerge from the game. 

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.

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