Imagination and National Security

“But that’s not the way we did it last year”. There, in a single sentence, is the greatest threat to national security facing the United States. How many times have you heard that miserable idiotic foolishness? That sentence is the enemy of innovation, and it can be found throughout the national Security establishment. MI was advising the Commanding Officer of an elite unit in the US military charged with some of the most sensitive national missions imaginable. They had a fantastic track record of innovation. They had the best people, the best technology, an essentially unlimited budget and political backing to take on the toughest missions in the most exceptional circumstances. In a particularly sensitive area, they had a string of successes. MI asked them why they did not undertake more missions – they had the capacity. The CO thought about this for a minute and said, “You know, I don’t know. We could. You know what, you’re right, we need to…” Make no mistake; it takes a lot to mount those kinds of missions. They often span months, if not years. But their track record of success demonstrated that a lot more could be done. He is a great leader. He was not afraid to take thoughtful risks, he was open to suggestion, and did not care whether they came from inside his band of brothers or from a policy wonk. Sadly, he stands out in MI’s memory, of decades of service, as a unicorn.

“But, we have not received guidance.” This is another classic argument for inaction. Weak thinkers throw this out to absolve themselves of responsibility for stasis in their organization or its missions. They always wait for “higher” to identify and solve their problems for them. They fear telling “higher” they have a problem, usually because they are incapable of devising a solution. This is a classic failure of leadership in a culture where you are supposed to identify a solution and present it to “higher” when you report a problem. This sounds like West Point leadership 101, but you would be astonished not only by how often this comes up, but how high up the chain this excuse is wheeled out in defense of inaction.

On the battlefield the living are the innovators; those that could not improvise, adapt, and overcome, succumbed to stasis. So it’s ironic that an institution and culture that thrives in the field should be so sclerotic everywhere else. Politics is often the reason, fear of making decisions that might later turn out to be wrong. Conflict is so contingent that constant change should be baked into thinking. Context is important; plans should be a starting point, not a dogma followed point by point to defeat. The cannon of strategic to operational ‘strategies’, flowing seamlessly into plans, culminating in ‘operational concepts’, implemented by cross-coordinated staffs first designed in the Napoleonic wars, is all great in theory, but it fails more often than it succeeds. The endless creation of ‘working groups’ at higher echelons and ‘task forces’ at the tip of the spear, demonstrates how ineffective traditional structures can be, especially in the face of new dynamic threats. Thus bureaucracy and corporate ideology combine with politics as great anchors in innovation.

Strategic planners tend to get mired in process and efforts to appear to be in sync with corporate thinking. That completely misses the point. Operations take plans as a scene-setting starting point and evolve as circumstances change. The two methods are antithetical to one another. One is the product of a closed system of thinking, where complexity, friction, and fog are subordinated to rigid programmatic edicts. The other is a necessary requirement to the realities of the world and represents an open system of thinking that is founded in axioms but not ruled by them against prevailing evidence. In an effort to control complexity, closed systems over-generalize and over-simplify, which is necessary to a point but is almost always taken way too far.

Militaries are big bureaucracies. They get obsessed with hierarchy, process, and tradition, at the expense of flexibility. Thoughtful risk taking is necessary to adapt to new circumstances even at the strategic level. Failure is costly when statecraft tis on the line, but a rigid ‘man, train, and equip’ mentality is useless in intelligence and operations. There is a tipping point where bottom-up innovation must be forged into a greater whole. Finding that point is not easy or clear, it often finds us, to our cost. MI believes that we can strive to get better at finding that tipping point and defining it before it defines us. The answer lies, funnily enough, in epistemology.

How we think about the profession of arms and its connection to statecraft, is vitally important. Strategy is the connective tissue between the two. Strategy is “the use of resources to achieve an objective.” If you look at the swath of documents that spew forth from the Joint Chiefs down to the COCOMs, those documents are SINO (Strategy In Name Only). The truth is they are statements of executive principles. They touch on vague ideals, like protecting democracy, but they fail to discuss how resources should be marshalled to achieve that outcome. Indeed, a vague principle can be an outcome. You have to keep digging down to the CONOP level to see any serious discussion of means, ways, and ends (the order is important). Readers who have spent time in a COCOM planning staff know that millions of man hours are spent annually ‘aligning’ thought from the top to the bottom.  Much of this “synchronization” is an exercise in narrowing, and more often than that it is an exercise in English literature verbal massaging, and the creation of the harmful pretense of seamlessness. MI has seen 100+ person staffs all scratching away on staff-wide edits of documents no sane person will ever read. Nothing of substance comes up. At best a slight inflection is inserted to represent the editing/commenting command’s particular operational environment or toolset as it pertains to the ‘master mission statement’ issued from on high. It is important to ‘be on the same page’ – but all of this staff make-work can be reduced to a one page statement of principles – like a commander’s intent. That’s all that is required, those captured by the staff process will insist the Russian-doll embedding of ‘strategies’ from the top down is essential to resource allocation. That’s total rubbish. Resource allocation happens in very discreet settings, not in those verbose manifestos, and anything produced by the DOD is a mere guide anyway because Congress calls the shots. All of those staffs need to be slashed. Any document that cannot state its means, ways, and ends as they link to foundational principles in a page or two is a total waste of time.

Why do means come first? Because you go to war with the army you have. You fit your ways to available means. In an ideal world you would create innovative ways and then be granted the means to fulfil them, but it just does not happen that way and we need to stop kidding ourselves otherwise.  This does not exclude innovation, because it is generated outside that strategic loop (for the most part). When means drives ways you end up with an F-22 in a counterinsurgency, that was a bit of a cheap shot because F-22s will be valuable in the Pacific and an advanced fighter program can’t be created out of whole cloth in a matter of months. Strategic investment is the exception to the means, ways, ends rule. It is important, but should not be dominant. Currently there is a decided imbalance and it flows from big, long term acquisition programs to CONOPS. It should be the other way around in most instances. MI often ears the phrase ‘strategy by CONOP’ as a derisory comment on the absence of strategy – often due to absence of ‘guidance from higher’. Sound strategy making is in fact reflected in the CONOP process. An objective is identified. The available means and ways are assessed to determine whether the objective can be plausibly achieved. This is an important distinction from what is realistically achievable because too often that standard is an easy way to avoid entertaining new thinking. Weak thinkers will condemn this standard as being idealistic and hopelessly unachievable. That is not what is being recommended here. Plausible is a higher standard than possible, they are still on the realistic side of the spectrum if all imaginable options. Good staff work explores all the possible options; creative staff work refines the possible into plausible options. From there the best probable option(s) will likely present themselves. These should be shared with decision makers to further refine the art of the possible. Interacting with ‘higher’ presenting them with a problem-set, and a series of plausible options, allows them greater choice and may include means and ways they had not considered. A staffing process like this builds trust between the operational force and ‘higher’, leading to greater autonomy and room for maneuver for both sides. In time, everyone will realize they are on the same side. Imagine that!

Bottom up, ‘possibilist planning’, is already being practiced out of sheer necessity. It is a practical approach that people use when they have run out of options and yet the need for success remains pressing. Possibilism displaces optimism and pessimism, both of which are dangerous when lives are at stake and there is no clear path forward. They also distort thinking in destructive ways. Possibilism requires that we be as objective about the facts as possible. Despite the current domestic political moment, where America is awash in highly sophisticated propaganda, much of it home-grown; facts do exist and can be discerned. In fact, the battle of competing narratives should be seen as nothing more than motivated reasoning – seeking only the information that supports what you already believe. This is an incredibly powerful way of thinking and is referred to as “confirmation bias” in psychology. Motivated reasoning restricts consideration of what in law is called ‘exculpatory evidence’ – those facts that do not conform to the theory of the case. Sound strategic and operational planning must resist the temptations of motivated reasoning. Possibilism is its antidote and is derived from no less an authority than Aristotle himself (with a bit of help from Hegel).

Aristotle is the father of science and the scientific method, Science is the study of cause and effect in the world of natural phenomena defined as those things in nature that are beyond human control. Like gravity. Demonstration or proof is essential to finding the truth. Like an apple falling off a tree. Hegel shows us that the same methodology can be applied to ideas that are very much a matter of human control. The Hegelian dialectic sifts competing ideas from hypothesis to thesis to antithesis to synthesis. The demonstration or proof in this case being the testing of ideas against alternatives. Therein lies truth.

Aristotle was not a determinist. He believed in free will and human agency. Humans have the power to make choices that change situations within their control.

Most of the thing about which we make decisions, and into which we therefore inquire, present us with alternate possibilities… all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity.

Aristotle believed that the realm of possibility was driven not by scientific analysis but by human intervention and persuasion. His system of persuasion or methods for reframing compelling narratives is the essence of The Art of Rhetoric.

Ethos:    The will to make change. The author of change must have a strong character and possess credibility and authenticity.

Logos:   The logical structure of argument. It is essential to provide a rigorous case for transforming problems into possibilities, possibilities into ideas and ideas into actions.

Pathos: The capacity to empathize. The author of change must be capable of inspiring movement on a large scale.

“Ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh. To be a master of metaphor is the greatest thing by far. It is a sign of genius.”

Possibilism is contingent on being open to new ideas – both data and analysis. The absence of data does not preclude possibility. The only limit to possibility is necessity, those things that can not be changed. Those factors are not just external but internal to your decision making. The US military often gets obsessed with data at the expense of analysis, let along action. Collection of data is not an end in and of itself. In so many cases, US military data collection and its application are completely unscientific and totally meaningless. Often junior personnel who are closer to their college experience know they are wasting their time but dare not tell ‘higher’. Or great data is collected but not analyzed. Or, if analyzed, is resident on servers that then leave with the unit or headquarters during redeployment cycles. MI has seen this happen constantly in current wars and the observation is mirrored in accounts of past wars (see the MI entry on Ellsberg’s Secrets).

Maintaining the discipline if keeping an open system of thought is hard. It demands much more effort than a closed system where ‘everybody knows what the boss wants’ while the boss grumbles that his/her staff is not presenting anything new. This happens at all levels of command. President Obama famously sent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and SECDEF back to create better options on more than one occasion. By that, President Obama meant authentic choice, not two impossible ’options’ sandwiched around the only COA that DOD wanted all along. It is true that once you get to that level a lot of choice has been removed from the system. This is by design, easy choices should not make the President’s desk, this merely reinforced the point that an open system from the bottom up is important to maximize choice for all burdened with that responsibility up the chain of command.

Empathy is vital to possibilism and effective intelligence and decision making. It is foremost about understanding the opponent. Webster defines empathy thus:

The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present, without having the feelings thoughts and experiences, fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

There could barely be a better definition of intelligence in the service of statecraft. The best intelligence professionals and strategic leaders are able to put themselves in the shoes of their opponents, to know what he is thinking and what he values most.

The constant refrain for years after 9/11 was ‘why do they hate us?’ Nothing could better illustrate a failure if empathy. Had we known in advance why we were hated, there is the possibility that atrocity and all that came after it might have been avoided. This is not to say no one knew. But they were insufficient in number and standing to be heard. History is replete with cases where opponents failed to grasp the thoughts and motivations if one another. This is why Clausewitz cautioned leaders not to embark on war unless they fully appreciated the true character of the conflict.

It is insufficient to collect the dots if the system is incapable of connecting the dots. The collection of data is insufficient in itself to generate meaningful understanding. It must be in the service of creating or enhancing empathy of the opponent. This applies throughout the conflict spectrum, namely before, during, and after wars. A strategy that lacks empathy is bound to fail because it cannot hope to address those issues that the opponent values most, politics concerns the negotiation of interests between two or more parties, whether it is conducted by discussion or by other means. Clarity as to one’s own interests and those of the opponent are vital to successful negotiations and/or the termination of hostilities resulting in lasting agreement. The definition of interests is one of a set of assumptions that needs to be checked and rechecked by strategic planners and decision makers.

The international system is currently characterized as a multipolar system at risk of destabilization due tit e rise of powerful revisionist powers. Empathy-driven possibilism is vital to appreciating the context if competition between status quo and revisionist powers. By definition, revisionists seek to alter the status quo by reimagining or reframing a collective narrative in terms of the primacy of their interests. We see this in domestic politics all the time. The competition of narratives is fierce. So far, the possibility of the resort to other means appears remote, but not entirely implausible. Indeed, the complete absence of empathy in the domestic political context is a driver to the dark side of human passion that appears to be as yet unchecked. The outright demonization of political opponents and lust for prosecutorial solutions to differing world views is one the rise in the United States. This is a cause for serious concern and the subject of a future assessment on MI.

International revisionism is rampant and on the march in almost all quarters, whether it is soft revisionism of Brexit or the hard revisionism of Russia, Iran, China, or ISIS. Liberal democracies are under serious threat from within and without. The rise of authoritarian revisionism is currently enjoying a broad renaissance. It is not some stage past which political evolution cannot return. Authoritarianism is not monolithic. It too is a matter of degrees, best understood in a spectrum from soft to hard to total, it is creeping into locations where it has not previously existed and intensifying and hardening where it enjoys purchase among disgruntled or coerced peoples. The United States is an example of the former, and the Philippines, Turkey, and much of Eastern Europe, the latter. The great democratic revival following the cold war, which saw a swath of countries turn away from their authoritarian roots, is being reversed not just in Europe but in what were fledgling democracies in Asia and Africa.

The disunity within and among the liberal democracies that are also great powers suggests that the initiative has passed to the revisionists. Multipolarity and the distinct withdrawal of the United States from international leadership across a range of global issues further compounds the power of, and opportunities available to, the revisionists. A great illustration of the foreseeable strife to come is found in the Iran case. In December 2017, Iraqi forces finally destroyed all remaining effective power of ISIS in that country. It will not be long before Syria has completely crushed its own ISIS threat. The Iraqi case should be celebrated as proof of the train, assist, advise and support model of US operations – the light footprint approach initiated at the end of the Bush Administration. To some degree, this has been just such a success, particularly in light of the contribution of Kurdish forces in the counter-ISIS fight. However, this is not the whole story. As was the case soon after the US invasion, Iran has played a central role both politically and militarily in both Iraq and Syria to counter the Sunni-based ISIS threat. Iran and its proxies have arguably been much more important to the defeat of ISIS than the efforts if the United States. Notably, Iran has long penetrated Iraqi Kurds and has its own Kurdish proxies so there is a question mark over how much the US has achieved even with the Kurds. For many American military and strategic leaders, this will be a difficult data point to accept, but it cannot be ignored. Pretending Iran is not expanding its power and influence across the Middle East and around the rim of the Persian Gulf serves no purpose than to confuse our own thinking. This is precisely the kind of mistake MI is concerned about and a driver behind this assignment. The fact is the American invasion of Iraq and the elimination of the regime removed a bulwark against Iran’s power and influence. Iran had no hope to topple Saddam Hussein by itself. His iron grip was too tight to allow an Iranian backed insurgency to flourish and, following the long and inconclusive conventional war in the 1980s, Iran had given up on conventional solutions to its Saddam problem.

Does the United States employ empathy in assessing Iran’s interests, capabilities and intentions? Do we really understand their drive to Empire and objective of subordinating the Sunni world to its influence, if not power?  Further, Iran seeks to eject the US from the region in order to further consolidate its position. Possibly the worst thing the US could do is invade Iran. This might have been a consideration back in the early 2000s, but it has effectively been ruled out by Iranian subversion against the US all around Iran’s borders. American will, blood, and treasure have been sufficiently drained over the past decade by a thousand cuts, that Iran really does not need a nuclear deterrent to ensure the survival of its regime. The internal threat is another matter. But again, the unsubtle ‘diplomacy’ recently employed by Washington in the region has been a unifying vehicle within Iran and has significantly diluted the authority and standing if the regime’s opponents. Had empathy been utilized, this shortfall in US persuasion efforts might have been anticipated and avoided. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel’s influence over the White House have contributed to short term tactical goals at the expense if a pragmatic and patient strategic policy.

Intelligence collection against Iran lacks for nothing. Specialized assessment houses may be rich in empathic analysis. Yet the actions of the United States suggest that Iran policy is being driven from outside these channels, there are too many unforced errors to be the product of a robust and rigorous possibilist approach. Without being able to look under the hood of US diplomacy, it is hard to pinpoint where the problems lie, but then again, the chaos at Foggy Bottom is quite openly displayed at present, Dysfunction merely multiplies the consequences of US withdrawal from global affairs.  The recent reporting by Michael Lewis in October’s Vanity Fair concerning the Trump approach to running the Energy Department is alarming (Oct 2017). Lewis catalogues what appears to be a deliberate policy to dismantle the department from the inside, which was part if candidate Trump’s promise to essentially destroy government as we know it. The same is happening at State and EPS et al, if reports are to be believed. The one place where signature cut backs are needed, the DOD, is no doubt protected by Secretary Mattis, who seems to be the only independent member of the cabinet. MI should stress that there is a world of difference between well-thought-out and necessary brush clearing and scorched earth ransacking. SOS and the IC need surgery to be sire, but amputation at the neck is pushing a good idea way too far.

The recently released National Security Strategy (2017) outlines key principles but, like its predecessors, it fails to clearly articulate means, ways, and ends. The nesting Russian dolls that follow, starting with the National Military Strategy on down, will all suffer the same failures. It’s time for a new approach. These important principles should be distilled into a few pages. The incredible talent resident on the Joint Staff and in COCOMs around the world need to be freed from world policing duties and the enforcement of lock-step groupthink, and turned loose on the thorny problems that beset America charged with finding effective, efficient, and imaginative concepts of operations to detect, deter and defeat the full spectrum of threats leveled at the United States, its allies and friends. The DOD and other agencies did not spend millions on sending their top people to Staff and War Colleges, taking a key human asset offline for a year, just so they could forget the critical thinking skills they we taught, to go back to changing ‘happy’ to ‘glad’ in empty documents that masquerade as strategy.

Possibilist strategic planning needs to be adopted across the DOD and IC. Separation of intelligence from planning and operations makes for clear hierarchical flow charts, but does not make for cohesive actions on the ground. After studying this issue for over a decade, MI recommends a hybrid structure, the nucleus of which is the small planning cell, called a Mission Action Cell, or ‘MAC’, comprised of three categories of thinkers: analysts, operators, and engineers. This works at all levels of command. Using the supported-supporting concept, higher command will typically focus on analytical tasks, but these must be infused with real-world insights from operators and engineers to assess what is possible. Imagination unwedded to reality is as useless as no imagination at all. At the pointy end of the spear, the operator will be supported by a dedicated analyst and engineer to explore and test new TTPs permitted by intelligence insights and technology, respectively. There will also be unique circumstances, where the mission is technology dependent, in which placing the engineer as the supported element makes best sense. Ideally, these groups need to be kept as small as possible and emphasis placed on strong working relationships. It is always better to have team players than one all-star who infuriates the rest of the team. A true all-star (and they do exist), who is an individualist and incapable of working in a team, should be used as an advisor for brief periods of problem solving. Such teams can be geographically or functionally arranged, as needed. There will always be loose ends and difficult overlaps, as there are in any system. Teams should be mission or objective driven (the latter indicating a wider goal than just one mission). Planning staffs should be empowered to self organize MACs and stay fluid. That means form and reform over missions or objectives; do not stay static.

Leadership should be restructured, too, along ‘National’, ‘Theater’, and ‘Tactical’ lines in accordance with the mission or objective. That way the right expertise can be applied to the problem regardless of traditional boundaries – be they geographic, organizational, or bureaucratic. In the MAC construct, if the engineer has the best solution, she should lead. This is the heart of self-organization.  MI accepts this might be difficult to achieve given extant leadership structures and chains of command, but the fact is, much of what is suggested here for structural change has already been practiced in an ad hoc way at all levels of command. OPERATION NEPTUNE SPEAR and OPERATION OLMYPIC GAMES are useful examples where particular expertise were brought to bear in MAC-like organizations, although these grew in size, the cellular structure could accommodate the growth in the network. The rise of the Task Force at the NSC level on down demonstrates the need for this realignment. The suggestions made here are based on years of observing the pros and cons of the Task Force model.

Mission Action Cells rightly put the emphasis of their purpose on action. Self-organizing and self-regulating, the MAC structure pushed decision making down to the lowest practical level. The cellular construction if MACs around an objective or mission is inherently flexible because they are fundamentally based on networks not hierarchies. Networks serve outcomes, hierarchies serve bureaucracy. Look around the DOD, interagency and growth areas of the US economy (Silicon Valley), those organizations that are prospering are networked. Technologies like Slack can facilitate network structures but the key is culture. By this, MI means the mindset that is brought to bear on the problems being solved. Changing the cultures if the DOD is an ambitious project. But, let’s face facts. We have not won any wars lately. What better motivation do we need to engage in strategic possibilism, to explore better ways of doing business? For all our power, money, technology, and the best people, (defined by skills and motivation), can we not come up with a better way of doing business than a 19^th century French general whose army marched in squares on the battlefield wearing fur topped hats?

A final word on structure. The HQs would continue to supply the forces that support the MACs. The ‘man, train, and equip’ function is impossible to avoid, but that does not mean its objectives can’t be fashioned around the MAC concept. The question is what to do with the COCOMs? Originally organized around AOs, to their number a small group of functional commands emerged, SOCOM, STRATCOM, and CYBERCOM. The forces behind the functional commands are also behind the MAC concept. It is probably asking too much to deconstruct the COCOM model, despite its obvious limitations. For example, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan are three sides of a strategic triangle that is separated by COCOM boundaries. This has real world impacts on how we think about the problems in the triangle and act on the resulting plans. Still, organizing globally around MACs would be a disaster, at least in the administrative sense. Just think of all the organizations required to be involved in certain territorial spaces. Yet equally, MACs that truly transcend boundaries will be ineffective if their chains of command get interrupted at the COCOM boundary. One solution might be to acknowledge the administrative functions of the COCOMs relative to the operationally focused MACs in their AM the way HQs support COCOMs. The intelligence planning and operational functions would be the domain of the MACs while logistics, C2 and other support functions stay with the COCOMs. This clearly needs further expert analysis, but all of it is possible.

MACs would also facilitate the integration of the IC and IA into an objective oriented missioned focus approach to solving problems and proving options to decision makers regardless of institutional boundaries.

The bigger issue in this recommendation is not the structure, but the culture if national security planning and execution. Closed hierarchical innovation resistant methods have got to give. The DOD, IC, and USG needs to get back to basics and adopt a strategic possibilist mindset, based on Aristotelian logic, as the key pathway to innovation in thinking and doing national security. The days of going to war on PowerPoint need to be over. At the strategic level, we need to go back to long dorm narrative position papers that fully explicate reasoning behind policy choices ensuring hypotheses are rigorously tested, counter arguments are refuted or accommodated, and effective solutions adopted. All the excuses that this is too hard or there is not enough time, or it will never work, are just that – excuses. We have to accept what we are doing is not working. There are patches of excellence. We must build upon these. Strategic possibilism and a new mission-focused MAC structure might point the way.

Military planning is suited to the machine age. It is a ‘join-the-dots’, meets ‘color-by-numbers’, rote, 12 step program. Consistency, coordination, timing, deconfliction, these are essential to mass-based, machine-driven warfare. By default, they also drive other operations as well, if not directly, certainly indirectly via support requirements and the like. The military planning process is as good as far as it goes, but it stifles creativity, traditional military planning processes leave that to a commander and his/her genius. Why limit possibilities? Warfare has always been a fundamentally human endeavor. That will never change. Its character and conduct are increasingly focused on small groups and individuals – people, not massed armies.

America still thinks in terms of mass industrialized warfare.  WWII is over. Technology has given individuals intelligence power in their hands that used to only be available to commanders. There is more computing power in a smart phone than in the systems that put man on the moon. Your phone provides you with satellite imagery on real time that far exceeds the coverage and resolution than handed to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Moving maps, mobile communications, finance, photos and videos, everything an army needed battalions to provide to HQ in the past, all now in your hands and that of the WMD-armed terrorist (for example) turning that terrorist into the ultimate smart bomb.

The ‘color-by-numbers’, top-down, hierarchical mode of doing business has long since been abandoned across human activity, including war, at least by adaptive thinking bad guys. They have re-visioned warfare, in the pursuit of a ‘David’s Advantage’ against the status quo ‘Goliath’s. Warfare has sped up since Gudarian’s Panzers swept Western Europe. Guardian’s War moves at the speed of light flashing through fiber optic cables to supersonic drones. It is no longer linear. Fighter Command no longer waits for the bell to ring to run to the spitfires to engage massed bombers.  A virus sneaks undetected into the Fort and brings it to its knees without a shot being fired. If you are reading this on the metro going to work, the person sitting next to you in the black jacket might be the next George S Patton, but it’s more likely he will be the next Edward Snowden or Osama bin Laden. He is not helpfully wearing a uniform with a death skull on it to hint at his intent. He’s just a commuter with the power to earn a salary and put his kids through school, or to ensure you never see yours again.

The intelligence cycle and the military planning 12 step programs are hopelessly out of date. Machine thinking needs to give way to a biological mindset, one that emphasizes non-linearity, movement, viral contagion, where good ideas move at the speed of social media and the limits of possibility are circumscribed only by those things outside of human control – the rest is up for negotiation. MI likes to think of this as moving from Circular to Heliacal thinking. The Helix bends and curves, it has information moving in all directions, bit the arc of the helix bends to discovery. It might mutate, or it might evolve, but it moves. Circular thinking does not.

A counter argument for machinist thinking might be that it’s easier to teach – a check-list can be followed by the lowest enlisted warrior in times of stress (or those operating actual machines of war – where accurate performance is required).  Again, the draft is over, folks. The quality of personnel is at a historical high. The frustrations of machine thinking can be read in the blogs (and now books) of field grade officers who got out, frustrated that their talents were not being tapped. Hopefully they all went to satisfying jobs in Silicon Valley – many did – and they still want to give back but the huge grey/green monster has no place for them. This is wrong. Their opposite numbers in ISIS and Iran don’t have Silicon Valley to turn to, so they live in and innovate with a revolutionary’s zeal. While our best and brightest, who want to innovate, are sidelines as being too disruptive. Ironic, no?

Part of MIs evolving mission is to offer new ideas /perspectives. Some might find this disruptive. If you read MI and get agitated – fantastic! If you got bored – that would be a million times worse. Money is no substitute for creative thought. In fact it might be a hindrance. The apocryphal board room meeting where the CEO says “Gentlemen, we have run out of money, now we must think,” will always have purchase, and no more so than in the US DOD. Constraint, and not abundance, is often the motivation to innovation. In the comparatively resource-rich US national security world, the key constraint more often than not is a will to innovate and a culture that is comfortable with curiosity and novelty.

In the DOD, ‘we don’t have the resources’ is a typical lament. What is never heard is ‘alas, we don’t have imagination’ – except in national commissions that follow strategic disasters.

We lament the lack of resources all the time. Yet, how often have you heard someone say ‘We have too much curiosity around here. We keep picking apart our assumptions. There is simply too much imagination being exercised here.’

At the risk of creating a new 12 step program and thus defeating the whole point, MI acknowledges that PowerPoint thinking is so deeply ingrained in DOD thinking that it would probably be useful to readers to present possibilism in a slide, if for no other reason than to clarify where in the process certain steps should be followed. We hope it was clear enough in our narrative but present the slide as a summary. The key phrases are thus: curiosity – division of necessity form possibility – analysis generated empathy – combined with audacity – leading to the creation of an innovating plan that uses resources to achieve an objective.

For an example of possibilist thinking, read Robert Baer’s The Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower, Crown: NY, 2008. Baer completely changed MIs mind on how to deal with Iran and why it’s important to drop established assumptions and reconsider from the ground up how to find advantage in what appears to be a no-win situation for the US. In short, Baer advocates dropping our long-held alignment with Sunni states in favor of finding common cause with Shia Iran, he shows how American thinkers have missed Iran’s evolution from revolutionary state to exporter of terrorism to stable grounded superpower driven by interests and not as ideologically rigid as is assumed in orthodox assessments of Iran. By contrast, Sunni states in the Gulf are incapable of defending themselves; they are weak and states in name only. They are challenged by radical Sunni extremists who are nihilists without a political agenda. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their kin desire to kill all those who do not believe as they do – Muslim or not. Yes, they want a Caliphate but they offer nothing beyond a return to 7^th C draconianism. Baer makes a strong case that not only does Iran have the most powerful position and military capabilities in the region; it is driven by traditional state interests. “Ijtihad” is a Shia doctrine practiced by the Iranians that permits the exercise if independent judgment and allows for interpretations of The Koran according to reason and precedent. In sum, Iran is rational, Sunni terror groups are not. Iran is a powerful political, economic and cultural entity within a strong state architecture. None of these conditions apply to Sunni states or the terrorists that seek to unseat state power. Iran is organized, the Sunnis are not. He argues to settle with Iran as the best – or least worst – prospect for stability in the region, allowing the US to significantly reduce its footprint and thus resource allocation to the region. A settlement with Iran would also reflect the power realities on the ground in the Middle East and in many ways make local problems Iran’s problem, not ours.

Let Iran assume a leadership role with all the onerous responsibilities and costs of being a balancer.

This is a radical proposition. But Baer presents it with significant supporting evidence and reasoning. Clearly traditional ways of doing business has not resulted in positive outcomes for the US nor do new opportunities for stability and comity appear to be on the horizon. The Baer plan would sure shake things up and while there is significant risk for strife, especially given the position this would put Israel in, in the long term it might in fact help out Israeli partners because their current trajectory is not at all a positive one regardless of whether Sunnis or Shia are their main opponents.

The point for our poses however, is to illustrate how possibilism can generate some creative disruption, if for no other purpose than to encourage reframing old problems in new ways that from a different perspective, might offer new opportunities that otherwise were not previously visible.

Think differently.