Cognitive Dynamics on Clausewitz Landscapes by Rodrick Wallace

Author:Rodrick Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030264246
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This is a predetermined result clearly driven by the National Security Strategy doctrine quoted above. Military-funded research is centrally tasked with implementing doctrine, here constrained to deliver a simplistic engineering resilience involving the ability to bounce back to near normal function after significant perturbation. Current US security doctrine thus inhibits exploration more complex—and far more likely—scenarios that do not have politically palatable outcomes.

Failure to adapt national security doctrine to the underlying and evolving realities of tactical, operational, and strategic circumstances is a central, ongoing, and disastrous, failing of the current US security enterprise [5, 6]. In consequence, the bland parroting of an inherently flawed statement-of-doctrine in a major international journal is potentially an ethical lapse of some consequence, even though the associated research funding is highly desirable.

This is no small matter, and one is truly reminded of France’s “Elan vital”, a doctrine that involved, in addition to command blindness regarding German incursion through Belgium, such tactics as mass charges into concentrations of machine guns entrenched behind barbed wire. Today, US security doctrine calls for “Resilience”. Apparently, a 100 years has not been enough time for Western military practitioners to appreciate the deadly burdens of doctrinal fantasy. Of course, the American war in Vietnam and the recent occupation of Iraq also come to mind. It can be argued that, in spite of debilitatingly massive and continuing expenditures, the US defense establishment has had few significant strategic successes since the War in the Pacific (essentially, the USSR won the war in Europe). The Inchon landing of 1950, and the initial stages of the two Gulf Wars, were indeed tactical masterstrokes, but these were wasted by subsequent gross—continuing, and indeed accelerating—incompetence at the highest levels (e.g., [6]).

Apparently, this is all of a piece.

A growing economics literature raises significant questions regarding the utility of “resilience” as an organizing theme. Bene et al. [7], for example, writeAlthough it is appealing, one should not rely on the term too heavily. It is not a panacea and certainly not the new catch all for development. Instead, it needs to be considered more carefully, especially with the recognition of “good” and “bad” resilience.

On the basis of this, practitioners need to step back, consider the objectives of their interventions and then consider how resilience may support or actually hinder these objectives.

In particular, a resilience-based systems approach might end up leading us toward abandoning interest in the poor(est) for the sake of system-level resilience.

The politics of resilience (who are the winners who are the losers of resilience interventions) need to be recognized and integrated more clearly into the current discussion.

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