Ever since Barry Posen published his article “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundations of US Hegemony,” strategists have written volumes about controlling the strategic commons–the air, the sea, space, and cyberspace–in order to maintain strategic primacy. The concept of the “commons” is an holistic addendum to traditional geopolitics’ single-minded focus on land, sea, or air control that conceptualizes non-land environments as a unified zone. Department of Defense strategists Michèle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley, however, argue in a piece for Proceedings that US control of the commons is under threat. [click to continue ...]
From the monthly archives:
July 2009
The analysis tools used by security professionals to assess asymmetric threats (such as a terrorist vehicle bombing) in respect to mass events or gathering places in complex urban environments rate poorly. A rethink is needed. [click to continue ...]
Over at his blog, Stephen Pampinella continues a long-running series of reflections on the intellectual implications of current strategic concepts. Pampinella correctly notes that much strategic thought on counterinsurgency is constructivist in nature, an oddity in the usually realist US defense community. Constructivist thought views identity as fluid, contingent, and complex. Actions are not necessarily guided by material factors, institutions, or a static group identity. The essence of constructivist thought is best captured by international relations theorist Alexander Wendt, who famously attacked the realist insistence that an anarchic world system makes states behave according to rational calculations of interest by arguing that “anarchy is what states make of it.” [click to continue ...]
In the May 11, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell penned a fascinating study of what happens when underdogs break the rules. The article has relevance to red teaming as Gladwell examines the studies of political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft: [click to continue ...]
Curtis Gale Weeks, the founder of Dreaming 5GW, has been largely absent from the blogsophere. In the last few days, he’s returned with commentary on the Iranian information war that demonstrates why he’s been sorely missed. In his first post on his revamped personal blog, Weeks ruminates a bit on the “Greening” of Twitter:
“Embattled Iranian goes to Twitter; said Iranian flits about different twitter streams and finds a certain number of greened iconography: depending on the number of Twit streams visited, the number of green-supporters will vary, but no matter the actual number of different green icons viewed, the icons will begin to blur. My own ‘Followed’ stream seems awash in green, but that’s because many of those I follow post multiple tweets in a short period of time, filling up the screen. So one or two of them might seem like a lot of green support. Naturally, any given Iranian can only visit so many sites, see so many greened icons. A short perusal might give the impression of massive support coming from the Twitterverse — even if any given Iranian may only witness a very limited number of Twit streams.”
While the greening of thousands of Twitter profiles may seem like the mobilization of a movement, Weeks points out, argues that it is in fact “the sound of multiple people clapping one hand in the effort to increase the volume of their outrage.” Weeks then segues into a broader point about the problems of information-age mobilization strategy:
“I do not believe the human mind handles large numbers very well, particularly when those numbers manifest in the physical plane as individuals and individual actions, or representative of same. … [V]irtually all humans naturally believe that individual observations (what happens locally) are representative of the world entire.”
The problem with “think globally, act locally” is that the local actors often globally extrapolate when assessing their actions. The Internet and the “cloud” worsens this tendency because it allows a person to infinitely copy themselves across the infosphere. During the Iran crisis, for example, one in four Iran-related Tweets was a Re-Tweet. While one could argue that this self-multiplication creates a force multiplier effect, it also furthers mirror-imaging. In fact, self-multiplication is literally mirror-imaging because all you see is copies of your own efforts.
