This is an Essential Element of Information for a Culture of Preparedness post

The Teams of Leaders (Tol) concept introduced in the book America's Army; A Model for Interagency Effectiveness by retired Army  Generals Frederic Brown and Zeb Bradford has been a point of discussion and thread through many articles and posts on both this blog and the  main "e-zine" website.  (See Edition 7 in the Archives for links to the primary articles). Now through hard work by PWH advisor and author of many of the articles discussing TOL in a homeland security context, Dag von Lubitz,  along with leaders at Central Michigan University and the University of Western Ontario, The Center for Collaborative Leadership in Healthcare is underway with a new website defining their mission, capabilities, and future plans.

As a refresher, from the site introduction,

Teams of Leaders (ToL) is an approach for rapidly building and effectively employing cross-boundary teams that are highly competent in making and executing decisions and in learning and adapting together. The ToL approach helps the leader-teams to gain a common understanding of the situation and requirements, develop shared purpose, trust and confidence, and reach a higher level of performance faster. Cross-boundary teams today consist of leaders from different organizations brought together to leverage the expertise, experience, and resources of their entire organization.

The Scientific Director is Dr. Dag von Lubitz, Adjunct Research Professor, College of Health Professions, Central Michigan University.  Leadership from Central Michigan University is   Dr. Steven Berkshire. Director, Doctor of Health Administration Program, College of Health Professions, Central Michigan University; and from The University of Western Ontario, Dr. Candace Gibson, Associate Professor, Department of Pathology, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

As discussed in the current PWH e-zine edition on implementation of TOL in EUCOM, ToL policies, programs and practices are equally applicable across military or civil, governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Originally developed to serve in the military world of joint, inter-agency, inter-governmental, multinational JIIM teams it is exceptionally well suited for the same type of global activities executed by agencies and organizations of civilian corporations.  This is the first formal translation in a non-military context.

In every sense, as defined, this is an important INTERSECTION.

Haiti – Essence of Decision – Operation Unified Response

In attempt to establish a framework for discussion of the many facets of the Haiti disaster, and as a precursor  to addressing the question – What kind of a community or organization –or indeed, group of organizations – can survive and thrive in unconventional, uncertain and severe crisis environments? - multiple articles from varying perspectives on Operation Unified Response  are being posted on  DaVinci's Horse,  the Facebook Page.

•  Note:You do not have to be a Facebook Member to view the page and follow the links to articles.Facebook may present an interim page with requirement to click  Continue.  To go to DvH , after following a link click the page tab rather than using the back arrow.

Boyd Compendium          Edition Archive     Facebook page    "What Kind of War"

PWH begins 2010 with four new elements which can be viewed directly by clicking on the title below each picture for that element.

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  The work of the late Col John Boyd has been at the core of much of what this website is about.  This page provides a partial archive of his work – created with the closing of White Horse advisor, Dr Chet Richards, Defense and the National Interest Website.


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  For ease of reference, all previous editions of PWH have now been archived including the e-mail announcements and Editor's Notes.  Previous work will be increasingly leveraged in 2010.


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  There is now a Facebook link on the website to a page created on FB for the DaVinci's Horse series and for posts considered more relevant to day-day events – such as the ongoing operations in disaster relief in Haiti.


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   In On War, Carl von Clausewitz stated that the single most important thing both a statesman and a commander must do was to determine "what kind of war" they were embarking upon.  Since the 08:46: 40 impact of American Flight 11 on the World Trade Center, have we determined or defined such?  I think not and this series leverages thinking and writing from multiple perspectives to emphasis that point and more importantly, discuss why it impedes our progress. There are 11 posts…. so far. In addition, this series is intended as essential elements of information for a culture of preparedness and  precursor to efforts to be discussed in 2010.

Edition #9 is planned to be on line by late (incorporate results and research on operations in Haiti) February (March April time frame).  Leveraging previous focus on  the idea of  a Resilient Community, a necessary Culture of Preparedness, and the portrayal of our world as "systems of systems existing in unstable equilibrium" as noted by  Dag von Lubitz in Edition #8 DaVinci's Horse article, "The Utility of Effort," the focus for Project White Horse  084640 in 2010 will be:

Organizational and Community Operations for Surviving and Thriving in a High Tempo Observe-Orient-Decide Act Environment

Haiti operations add: In this century we now have the arrival of the "fourth horsemen" (9-11, Tsunami, Katrina + now, Haiti) as unconventional hypercomplex crisis. Despite the oupouring of publicity, media, and massive donations, did anyone really think multi-function, multi-nation, multi-organization relief operations were going to self-collaborate?

One must ask "what kinds of organizations AND groups of organizations can operate effectively in hypercomplex environments." No one can "lead" this by themselves. How does one resolve patient needs, security of the highest order, saving of trapped people, and distribution of badly needly supplies at exactly the same time in exactly the same location? The answer must be unconventional.

Throughout the year, the intent is to leverage all four PWH vehicles:

1. The main website "E-zine" quarterly editions


2. The FORUM/blog


3. The specifically focused INTERSECTION posts


4. The social network element of DaVinci's Horse on Facebook.

As always your comments, suggestions and offer of articles is most desired. Best way to communicate (note anti-SPAM spelling) – projectwhitehorsatroadrunnerdotcom.

Thanks for your readership and past comments!

Ed@PWH

Essential Elements of Information for a Culture of Preparedness

War is always violent, taking its toll on soldier and civilian alike, always messy, always complex whether the battlefield be at  Thermopylae, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, or Fallujah.  But I would offer however, that both warfighter and citizen alike of the "Greatest Generation" understood well that the Battle of Britian was fighter warfare, the Battle of the Atlantic submarine warfare, the war in the Pacific both aicraft carrier warfare and amphibious warfare. And of course whether island hopping or struggling through the snow at Bastogne, there was always the Soldier and Marine rifleman. Complex, yes, but also easier to understandand and put in context than the dynamics of events since September 11, 2001 in my opinion.

For this century we have created a somewhat confusing array of terms:  network centric warfare, fourth generation warfare, guerrilla warfare or counterinsurgency, all  mixed with conventional and unconventional warfare, all in context  with war on terrorism, and  further, now the attempt to differentiate with conventional warfare, there are irregular warfare and hybrid warfare.

While situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan have forced rethinking, then rebuilding – since warfighting in Vienam - counter-insurgency (COIN) capability, planning for future wars – structure, rolls and missions, and technology – require serious thought on what the next threat might be – state on state war (as in WWII) with an emerging China or rebuilding Russia, or more of the same  – mix of insurgents, terrorists, or non-state actor mix along with state on state uniformed force on uniformed force.

This series of EEI posts suggests strongly that understanding this process and the outcome is not only necessary for our government and military (at all levels), but also for a prepared community in acknowledging, mitigating, and finally accepting some level of risk.  As Col Frank Hoffman (USMC, Ret) states in closing the following article "The Sept. 11 funding spigot is about to be turned off, returning the Pentagon to the need to rethink its priorities and make tough choices. We no longer have the resources to simply buy everything and eliminate every risk. We will have to consciously wrestle with this challenge in the upcoming QDR (Quadrenial Defense Review). The time for hard calls has arrived."

Col Hoffman's article discussing current thinking, planning and multiple approaches is well worth reading in full under Striking a Balance on Armed Forces Journal. Key points are provided below.  For  further information and different opinions see:

• "Hybrid Warfare" -Col Hoffman's defining concept in the PWH library


• Refresher on 4GW see Col G.I. Wilson's previous PPT/article. and Dr. Chet Richards article


• Discussion on COIN and Anti-COIN Revolution


• For a book review on David Killcullen's Acidental Guerrilla


• Counter insurgency focused blog: Abu Muqawama

Posturing the future force for COIN and conventional warfare (in part)

We are in another post-Iraq war debate about how to best posture our military investments for the future. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review will center on the critical question about the evolving character of conflict. Exactly what kinds of wars are we expecting to fight, and how should we allocate scarce time and resources to maximize readiness and deterrence while minimizing risk? The not-so-subtle groundswell of resentment, if not outright bureaucratic resentment, coming from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' effort to allocate just 10 percent of the Pentagon's investment account for irregular warfare suggests that this will not be a simple matter.

Today's post-Iraq strategy and forces debate was first depicted in Andrew Bacevich's tart Atlantic Monthly essay, "The Petraeus Doctrine." He portrayed a stark choice between two competing camps in the U.S. military. At one end of the spectrum of conflict, he observed that there was a group which he derisively called the "Crusaders," who were promoting an emphasis on counterinsurgency and irregular threats as the proper focus for our armed forces. At the other end of the spectrum, he identified a competing school of thought, which he labeled the "Traditionalists." Bacevich personalized the ongoing debate by using two prominent contemporary authors, retired Army officer John Nagl and West Point's Col. Gian Gentile, as the polar protagonists.

This "black and white" option set created a false binary choice that is great for media consumption but represents a gross oversimplification and distorted conception of America's strategic options. It also created a caricature of the protagonists who offer much more sophisticated arguments when reviewed closely in context.

There are a variety of schools of thought on how to address this force posture problem. This assessment will examine a suite of four schools. In each school, the principal military threat and its probability and consequences will be identified. Additionally, the force structure requirements and posture shifts to support each school will be examined. The four schools include:

• Counterinsurgents, who emphasize the high likelihood and rising salience of irregular adversaries.

• Traditionalists, who place their focus on states presenting conventional threats.

• Utility Infielders, who balance risk by striving to create forces agile enough to cover the full spectrum of conflict.

• Division of Labor, who balance risk differently by specializing forces to cover different missions to enhance readiness.

(PWH note: The complete article discuuses each school in depth followed by analysis.  Here PWH just provides basic definition and Col Hoffman's conclusion)

Counterinsurgents

This school argues for a transformation based on today's fights. The advocates here believe that Iraq and Afghanistan represent far more than a passing blip in the evolution of conflict. They contend that massed formations comprised of traditional arms and large-scale conflict between conventional powers is not a realistic planning scenario. They contend that the most likely challenges and greatest risks are posed by failing states, ungoverned territories, transnational threats and radical versions of Islam.

This school contends that the purpose of having a military is not to perpetuate its preferred paradigms; it's about preparing for likely contingencies and securing America's interests. They worry that the U.S. military culture will reject the primacy or even necessity for competency in irregular warfare as operations in Iraq wind down. They argue that this would be a strategic mistake, more reprehensible than the institutional memory dump that occurred after Vietnam, and perhaps even more costly.

Traditionalists

The Traditionalists sit at the opposing end of the spectrum of conflict. This school seeks to re-establish the traditional focus of the armed forces on "fighting and winning the nation's wars." Its members focus on major, high-intensity interstate wars. They advocate against reorienting forces, especially ground forces, away from their traditional emphasis on large-scale, industrial-age warfare against states or an alliance of states.

This school does not ignore the frequency of irregular warfare or dismiss its persistent nature; it just believes that such scenarios are not amenable to military intervention and that these contingencies should not be the focus for the American military. Traditionalists want to retain the Pentagon's current procurement profile and its emphasis on "the Big Guns" for a future they predict will be conventional in nature and for which a large and expensive military is strategically necessary.

This school is particularly wary about the newfound embrace of messy, protracted counterinsurgencies such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are rightfully concerned about the degradation of combat skill sets within the Army and Marine Corps because of the severe operational tempo of today's conflicts. However, they also overlook the need to "win the wars we are in," as Nagl has noted.

Utility Infielders

The third and most prevalent school, at least among American ground force commanders, is the Utility Infielder school. This school recognizes the need to deal with strictly conventional tasks and irregular threats. It seeks to cover the entire spectrum of conflict and avoid the risk of being optimized at either extreme. Instead, it seeks to spreads this risk across the range of military operations by investing in quality forces, educating its officers for agility in complex problems, and creating tough but flexible training programs.

The Utility Infielder school is officially represented in the Army's new doctrinal manual, FM 3-0, which declares, "Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission that must be given priority comparable to that of combat (offensive and defensive) operations." This construct rejects the narrow mission profile of the Traditionalists and claims the Army must train its units in the application of "full-spectrum operations" to ensure it provides a balanced, versatile force to provide to joint and combined-force commanders. These "full-spectrum operations" emphasize the importance of adaptive, flexible forces able to fight and win in combat, whether facing a terrorist entity or the modern forces of a hostile nation. However, the real priorities of this school might be found in this crucial statement: Full-spectrum operations "will take us into the 21st century urban battlefields among the people without losing our capabilities to dominate the higher conventional end of the spectrum of conflict."

Division Of Labor

There are a number of analysts that reject the fundamental premise of the Utility Infielders school. This alternative school argues that irregular and conventional warfare are markedly different modes of conflict that require distinctive forces with different training, equipment and force designs. This camp places a great emphasis on preventing conflict, on stability operations and on investing in indirect forms of security forces with a greater degree of specialization for security cooperation tasks and war fighting. Because this school specifically divides and specializes roles and missions between the services, it can be labeled the "Division of Labor" option.

A team from Rand Corp. has proposed a different approach that rationalizes roles and missions, and offers a means of guiding future defense investments. This study is worthy of serious examination. This team notes that: "The imperative to promote stability and democracy abroad will place the greatest demands on the Army, the Marine Corps, and special operations forces (SOF). The most plausible regional wars that U.S. forces might be called on to fight — involving Iran, China (over Taiwan), and North Korea — call for heavy commitments of air and naval forces and, in the first two cases, fewer U.S. ground forces."

(Concluding comments)

False choice

The current bifurcation of the spectrum of conflict between irregular and conventional wars is a false choice and intellectually blinds us to a number of crucial issues. We need to assess our assumptions about frequency, consequences and risk far more carefully and analytically. The QDR's options are not simply preparing for long-term counterinsurgency operations or high-intensity conflict. We must be able to do both and do them simultaneously against enemies far more ruthless than today's.

Future opponents will exploit whatever methods, tactics or technologies that they think will thwart us. Canonical conventional scenarios do not help us prepare for such threats. We need to better posture our forces, reduce the risks we face and allocate scarce resources against threats that pose the most operational risk. I have contended that state-on-state, high-scale combat cannot be ignored, but hybrid threats are profoundly asymmetric and present the greatest operational risk to U.S. forces and to the attainment of America's strategic interests over the near to mid-range.

This reconceptualization will have significant implications for military force design and posture. In a perfect world, our military forces would be robustly sized, and we would build distinctive forces for discrete missions along the conflict spectrum. We would have separate counterterrorism forces, a force for protracted counterinsurgencies, expeditionary forces and heavy conventional forces for those rare but existential interstate conflagrations. The training and equipping of these forces would be well-matched to their expected operating environments and threats. But we do not live in a perfect world, and we need to prepare and shape our forces with a greater degree of uncertainty and with fewer resources. "We have to be prepared for the wars we are most likely to fight," Gates said on the Hill in May, "not just the wars we have been traditionally best-suited to fight, or threats we conjure up from potential adversaries."

The Sept. 11 funding spigot is about to be turned off, returning the Pentagon to the need to rethink its priorities and make tough choices. We no longer have the resources to simply buy everything and eliminate every risk. We will have to consciously wrestle with this challenge in the upcoming QDR. The time for hard calls has arrived.

Culture:  The sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another. Culture is transmitted, through language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art, from one generation to the next.

This post is intended to set the stage for a new group of FORUM articles/discussions expanding on the recently introduced Culture of Preparedness thread.

Since first publication in Fall 2006, Project White Horse 084640 has focused on providing multiple and varied perspectives on severe crisis environments and the decision making processes required.  With the introduction of the "resilient community" concept as a major theme, we began usage of this FORUM to bring multiple discussions and articles between editions with intent to move beyond "perspective" to exploration of workable approaches for "survival on our own terms." (Boyd)

The latest edition offers that a culture of preparedness is the necessary link between the threat generated environment (whether by accident, acts of nature, or purfoseful acts of man) and the threatened community. We have offered multiple perspectives to assist in understanding the problem, but one must ask, what actually defines a resilient community, what are the quantifiable ingredients, what is the make up of this culture, we state that we need?

Consider the following, borrowed from Department of Defense definitions:

Essential Elements of Information:  The critical items of information regarding the enemy and the environment needed by the commander by a particular time to relate with other available information and intelligence in order to assist in reaching a logical decision – required to plan and execute an operation.

These next FORUM offerings will expand the original PWH theme-defining triangle of worst case events, time criticality , and leader team response by offering multiple "elements of essential information" that seem inherent yet not necessarily obvious – in the makeup of a Culture of Preparedness.

As always your thoughts and inputs on the elements and future inclusions will be most welcome at projectwhitehorseatroadrunnerdotcom.

I'm very pleased to announce that Project White Horse 084640 Edition #8 – A Culture of Preparedness and Intersectional Ideas  – is now on line.

The last two editions have provided perspective on "resilient communities" and leadership required. In Edition #8 we shift from providing "perspective" to creating actionable understanding and answers. The first part of the Edition #8 focus (and) title borrows from General Russ Honore's stated goal – developing a culture of preparedness. As Russ's words have been featured on the site, having "a culture…" seems to highlight the very essence of developing and nurturing a resilient community. As such, "culture of preparedness" can be seen to complete a "strong triangle" with the additional sides of "resilient communities," and Team of leaders. Faced with severe crisis, that model demands creative approaches. We must look beyond the norm to multiple fields and experience bases and find ideas and answers at the intersections.

Intersectional ideas are those resulting from combining concepts from multiple fields – areas of specialization gained through education and experience – as compared to those created traditionally by combing concepts within a field – noted as directional ideas. Success in intersectional idea generation is dependent upon breaking down barriers of association that would more than likely indicate a "non relationship" or at best limited context between or among fields.

To date, the site has consisted of the electronic magazine website and a Forum for posting of articles between editions. Based on the above, INTERSECTIONS now becomes a third element of PWH. This intersection will be created by providing the thinking of a group with multiple and diverse backgrounds, including medicine, first response, intelligence, academia, and military with experience from Great Britain, Israel, service in both Iraq and Afghanistan and on mean street USA. The content will be operational threads selected for potential to increase actionable understanding. The following two topics have been under discussion and the dialogue provided:

1. Actionable Intelligence and Resilient Communities
2. Training Decision Makers to the "Ace' Level

Please see the Editors Note and the article introductions for more detail and to put this edition in the context of actionable tools – useable by emergency responders, private sector organizations and citizens in the process of building a culture of preparedness. Most assuredly you will find perspectives and intersections. You will find understanding that can be acted upon. You will find answers.

A final note: Given the obvious, finding a picture of a leader on a white horse will surprise no one, but in this case there is more, there is purpose. While there are many representations of those who have been America's leaders throughout our history, including scores of George Washington as commander of the Continental Army and as our first President, the depiction of Washington with his troops, having crossed the Delaware and moving toward the attack at Trenton is, to me, iconic reflection of leadership in severe crisis, His adaptability and audacity after three major defeats saved not only the spirit of the Continental Army, it provided the underpinning that would remain through the victory at Yorktown. In so doing as General Nathanael Greene would say "he will be the deliverer of his own country." A century later, in a classic study of the Revolution, Sir George Otto Trevelyan stated "It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever deployed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world."

It was he who held the army together and gave it spirit through the most desperate of times… not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual… (but) above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up … again and again in letters to Congress and his officers calling for unremitting courage and perseverance. 1776 by David McCullough

Noted as one of the world's 100 most decisive battles, the Battle of Trenton was most certainly testimony to General Washington's perseverance. He would not quit on the fragile American dream. In the sense of William Shakespeare's Henry V, I submit it is America's Agincourt moment – we few we band of brothers.

As stated in the previous edition, our forefathers by their actions in 1776 placed this country forever at the "dawn of victory." That victory demands perseverance in the face of great crisis and turmoil. It will be found in "a culture of preparedness."

Please join us at Project White Horse 084640

Ed @ PWH
29 April. 2009

The development and exploration of critical "operational threads" for future editions is still necessary. It would appear to me that education for wearing a uniform in Detroit … or in Baghdad requires a global focus as well as local. Lessons in one are needed in the other.
Here are some issues under consideration:

On the Plains of Hesitation, bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the Dawn of Victory, sat down to wait, and waiting died.

I reuse the George W. Cecil quote from the previous edition because I think it particular pertinent to the nature of this edition of Project White Horse 084640 and the time frame in which it is published.  This site is about decision making and leadership in crisis, but it is not about politics or political races, although leadership of a United States president is most certainly of significance when disaster strikes.  And so "leadership" cannot be discussed in September 2008 without at least acknowledging political context.

"Change" is the call of the day for both parties, but I think we should all keep in mind two things.  First, our founding fathers purposefully constructed the initial framework of the government of these United States, so that no one man/woman could dictate to "we the people." Our presidents are rightly limited by our Congress and our Supreme Court. Second, as we have most recently witnessed, no man controls his fate in the face of Mother Nature, and our world remains hyper complex globally with tribes and cultures having real and extreme survival needs and agendas for establishing their own way of living on this planet. We continue to see the results of the Great Powers decisions at the end of World War I establishing borders and splitting families and cultures. 

Our century is a messy place and will continue to be so no matter the headlines on November 5^th 2008 or the decisions and actions begun in January 2009. If we expect change, if we "wait" for the "victory" we will only be among those countless millions.

Leadership analysis and discussion is almost always about the individual and never about "the led."  Recent experience indicates that both rare events and those that may occur predictably -  but have potential for extremely rare severity – repeatedly overwhelmed traditional mechanisms for crisis planning, management and response.   Today's society is extremely complex.  When complex systems fail, the results are catastrophically chaotic. This complexity makes it nearly impossible for traditional leadership and organizational structures to plan, let alone coordinate response efforts. Indeed,  the entire community "system" is destabilized.  In those hyper complex or "unconventional" crises, the "led" must be able to lead. That requires understanding and then action in regard to two terms, best phrased by my colleague Dr. Dag von Lubitz:

·       preparedness  - the availability of all resources, both human and physical, necessary for the management of, or the consequences of, a specific disaster type (one that can be predicted)

·       readiness – instantaneous ability to respond to a suddenly arising major crisis [e.g. terrorism attack] that is based on the locally available/un-prepositioned and un-mobilized countermeasure resources (the Black Swan either in severity outside that normally expected or in rareness)

Response to unconventional crises requires both the leader and the led to be prepared and ready.

The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation by Frans Johansson

innovations occur when people see beyond their expertise and approach situations actively, with an eye toward putting available materials together in new combinations. Because of ions, "the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap of computation," a wide range of materials available for new, recontextualized uses is becoming a norm rather than an exception, much as the Medici family of Renaissance Italy's patronage helped develop European arts and culture.

Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl, Peter J. Schoomaker (Foreword)

...culture runs deep in organizations, helping or hindering organizational learning. The three key elements in meeting the organizational learning challenge: the right culture, the knowledge itself, and access to the knowledge.

The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 by Charles Edward White

... the transformation of the Prussian army from a robotic war machine into a modern fighting force that was instrumental in defeating Napolean in 1813 and in 1815. How organizations change

America's Army: A Model for Interagency Effectiveness by Zeb B. Bradford and Frederic J. Brown

a series of lucid and realistic solutions to the challenges posed by friction among organizations which must collaborate, but whose efficiency of joint effort is hampered by internal and external bureaucracies, procedural inflexibility, culture, or, worst of all, ignorance. Information Management plus Knowledge Management plus Commander Leader Teams = Teams of Leaders (TOL)

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson

technological advances and superior weapons have certainly played a role in Western military dominance, but cultural distinctions are significant factors. By bringing personal freedom, discipline, and organization to the battlefield, powerful "marching democracies" were more apt to defeat non-Western nations hampered by unstable governments, limited funding, and intolerance of open discussion. We want to fight hard, quickly, decisively, and go home, but if we can't?

1776 by David McCullough

...decisions in crisis at the beginnings of a country

Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America's Schools by John Giduck

...the story of Beslan Middle School from someone who went there and had the connections and background to see, understand, reflect, and tell the story

Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination  by Lee Clarke

Hard thinking about worst cases opens new possibilties. Envisioning worst case scenarios may allow us to reduce the probability of their emergence, reduce the time to recovery or both…even in this very nervous world, insufficient thought is being given to the possibility of worst cases…no how matter bad you thought things could get, they can get a lot worse.

Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham T. Allison  and Philip Zelikow

...the Cuban missile crisis through three different lenses – The Rational Actor Paradigm, Organizational Behavior Paradigm and Governmental Politics Paradigm, each of which is based on a different set of assumptions, each of which has a distinct bundle of organizing concepts and, each of which brings different general/specific propositions for the issue under question.

If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration by Chet Richards

... alternatives to the invade-occupy-fight paradigm and draws some surprising, important and instructive conclusions about what future forces and weapons should look like if America is to survive on its own terms in the world.

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

...transformed the way military aircraft-in particular the F-15 and F-16-were designed with his revolutionary Energy-Maneuverability Theory, then  dedicated his later years to a radical theory of conflict that was largely ignored during his lifetime, but that is now widely considered to be the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb

how the same technology that enabled globalization allows small, ad hoc bands of insurgents and criminals to wage a chaotic global war against larger adversaries and what we must do now to safeguard against this new method of global guerrilla warfare.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

exploration of randomness, examination of the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. We have problems with the abstract, we plan for what we know

The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers by Boaz Ganor

the dilemmas of countering terrorism, based on the Israeli experience extrapolated to the world.  There is no one answer for all occasions

 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

the nature and significance of "quality" – a necessary anodyne to the consequences of a modern world pathologically obsessed with quantity.

PWH offers that the dynamics of this century – 1) results and application of scientific progress – mainly information technology, 2) Globalization, 3) Mother Nature's defense of her turf in response to man's progression, and 4) actions of the non-state fighters of fourth generation warfare – create a linked problem set possibly un-faced by civilization to date. Effort to date has been intended to highlight key and sometimes overlapping elements and offer that when taken together they form the beginning of a minimum knowledge set necessary for adaptable response in a tumultuous new century. 

Some of those elements addressed are: the work of John Boyd on the OODA Loop and analysis and synthesis; Dr. Gary Klein's Recognition Primed Decision Making; vulnerability analysis in regard to schools including analysis of critical crisis events; and introduction of Fourth Generation Warfare as a lens for viewing not only the war on terrorism, but all aspects of crisis response.Based on this knowledge base and lessons learned from producing the website, throughout 2008, Project White Horse 084640 will explore thinking about the future in context of the idea of a resilient community, whether that "community" be a university, a city, a state, or a nation.

In order to become resilient communities, every single person in America – parents, teachers, students, police and government officials – as individual citizens and as organization members, must become our own best resource, ready to act in our own survival process, capable of effective support to First Responders, with decreased need for assistance, allowing that first response to be focused on most critical elements.  As we increase our ability to respond to disasters – natural or man-made – psychologically, physically, tactically, and mentally, we directly and positively affect the crisis decision making process.  We as knowledgeable adaptable citizens – we the people – become a significant participant in our survival as a nation on our own terms.

I submit that acquiring and using that skill in creation of a resilient community is first dependent upon 1) attitude- in this case incorporating the will to prepare- and equally important, 2) knowledge in areas not common or necessary in the previous century.

In preparation for the upcoming edition on Resilient Communities, links to key articles found during the research will be provided in the PWH Forum over the next few days, beginning with the following:

"Let us light a candle while we walk, lest we fear what lies ahead"

I believe that in 2060 our descendants will similarly laugh at our nightmares, while they look to the future with fear about challenges we cannot imagine.
Humanity was born naked and ignorant, bereft of either armor or weapons, on Africa's Serengeti Plains. We have survived droughts and floods, an ice age and a supervolcano — steadily leaning and developing our powers. We have always walked into an unknown future, but our past should give us the confidence to do so with caution but not fear.   

http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/fifty-years/#more-139