“See It Like Jones Would”

by Editor on May 20, 2013

We’ve collected the “See It Like Jones Would” posts on a single page. We will add new Jones essays to the page periodically. In the meantime, they’re always worth another read!

Red Teaming and Risk Analysis

by Mark Mateski on May 20, 2013

Red teaming and risk analysis intuitively seem like natural complements, but it’s not always clear how they relate. I’ve attached here a single slide from a capabilities briefing I built for my day job. In it I suggest one way to link the two disciplines explicitly. The gist of the message is that red teaming can enhance each element of the triplet definition of risk.

RT and RA

See It Like Jones Would: The Value of ‘Hierarchical Attenuation’

May 14, 2013

In Reflections on Intelligence, R. V. Jones briefly reviews the British decision to adopt a convoy system during World War I. The case brings to light two useful insights: (1) know your data’s heritage and (2) value the opinions of junior officers. It also emphasizes how easy it is to work at cross purposes within [...]

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Resiliency in Response: Reacting to Crises the Red Team Way

May 7, 2013

The Boston Marathon bombing, the plant explosion in West, TX, and ongoing events around the world represent the types of unexpected surprises that red teamers are expected to explore through planning, simulation, and modeling. When the unexpected occurs, how can the red team overcome the chaos, help control the situation, and manage the outcomes while [...]

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Pre- and Post-Event Red Teaming

April 16, 2013

In December 2008, I posted a short article on Red Team Journal discussing a simple hierarchical model of surprise. I divided the elements of surprise into three levels: strategic (who, why); operational (how, what); and tactical (when, where). If you view the model as a pyramid, the strategic level is the base, the operation level [...]

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Red Teaming North Korea

April 12, 2013

The actions of Kim Jong-un and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have surprised and frustrated analysts and national security thinkers’ best guesses over the past weeks. In life, there are adversaries and competitors who are unpredictable, and act contrary to your best assessment of their predicted behaviors. The difficulty of determining the strategy [...]

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We Have a Winner!

April 3, 2013

The contest for the RTJ Red Teaming Law #20 is over, and we have a winner! Riccardo Cappelli won with the following entry: RTJ Red Teaming Law #20: If you defeat the red team, you still have to defeat the enemy. And if you do not win the war, you can always blame the red [...]

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Blood in the Water: Another Call for Strategic Red Teaming

March 26, 2013

This morning I re-read a short piece I posted in 2010 titled “Red Team Journal, Thirteen Years On.” In it, I wrote “Chicken Little frets about a dystopian future in which the United States is broken and broke.” I argued that we could no longer compensate for our limitations by throwing money at them, and [...]

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Watermark Red Teaming Service

March 25, 2013

I rarely use Red Team Journal to promote my day job, but in this case I’m going to make an exception. We’ve revamped our red teaming service at Watermark, and I think we’ve done something unique: we’ve broken down the service into functions and are offering our clients the opportunity to select which functions make [...]

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See It Like Jones Would: Rocket FUD

March 21, 2013

In the spirit of the last “Jones” post, I’d like to revisit his narrative on the V-2. One of the key questions Jones and his colleagues struggled with was the size of the rocket and the rocket’s warhead. The experts’ estimates were at times rashly speculative (for which Jones excoriated them—a subject for another post).

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