I recently asked the RTJ team to recommend the influential books they think the well-informed red teamer should read. I intended to create a top-ten list, but with so many good suggestions, I decided to go with them all. I invite RTJ readers to comment, critique, and chime in. Do you agree or disagree? What are we missing? [click to continue ...]
From the monthly archives:
April 2009
The Pentagon conducted a large-scale economic warfare simulation earlier this month at Ft. Meade. As reported by Politico, this
“first-of-its-kind war game … focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants. …But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.”
Over the next few weeks, we will be building an RTJ glossary to better serve the red teaming community. In it we will include terms and concepts relating to red teaming and alternative analysis. Throughout, we will emphasize applied knowledge. We encourage the members of the red teaming community to join in the effort. Watch for the first terms this week.
Red teaming is both a broad term and a thought process which many planners and policy makers often implicitly and unconsciously conduct. But the term red teaming is associated with poorly defined ambiguities and few mainstream or scholarly resources are available. Although there are not many guides to red teaming, the best short read on the subject is the Final Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on the Role and Status of DoD Red Teaming Activities. [click to continue ...]
In a recent short post, we pointed RTJ readers to the Popular Mechanics article “Ten Careers for Right Now,” which features a brief discussion of red teaming as a potential career. If you’re still wondering what a red teaming job might look like, or if you’re interesting in pursuing a new opportunity, you should take a look at a current job posting at Sandia Labs. To find it, browse the career opportunities for reference 62513. On a related note, we are considering adding a job section on the Red Team Journal site. If you would like us to post your red teaming-related job opportunity, let us know.
A few months ago, I broke from the site’s focus on national security and posted a short opinion piece arguing that policy makers should red team our national economic strategy. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the original piece, so I wrote a new one. Now it would seem that events have overtaken the new piece; the administration recently announced that the recession is easing. Perhaps the immediate crisis has passed, and if so, perhaps the need to red team crisis-driven economic decisions has likewise passed. [click to continue ...]
A large portion of what red teaming is about is exploring the other side of an issue and attempting to break paradigms that may be detrimental to a plan. COL (ret.) Gregory Fontenot from the Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies describes the red teaming process as a structured and iterative process that ultimately provides a commander a capability to continuously improve upon a plan. He continues to say that the operational environment, plans, and operations could all benefit by repeated challenges to validity and applicability. Colonel Fontenot espouses continual re-evaluation of the typical way we do business.1 The red team must look at the fight through the eyes and culture of the enemy. This particular method, executed properly and coupled with a superior intelligence gathering plan, can yield outstanding results. [click to continue ...]
Notes:
- COL (ret.) Gregory Fontenot, “Seeing Red: Creating a Red-Team Capability for the Blue Force,” Military Review, September-October 2005. [↩]
Red teamers will want to read Coyne and Horn’s article “Predicting Your Competitor’s Reaction” in the April 2009 Harvard Business Review. Although the authors use the term competitor analysis instead of red teaming, they are describing the same activity. [click to continue ...]
