Rethinking Security

Memetics and Individualism

Marked for some future blogs:

David Brooks at NYT:

"I repeat these personal facts because we have a tendency to see history as driven by deep historical forces. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it is driven by completely inexplicable individuals, who combine qualities you would think could never go together, who lead in ways that violate every rule of leadership, who are able to perpetrate enormous evils even though they themselves seem completely pathetic. Analysts spend their lives trying to anticipate future threats and understand underlying forces. But nobody could have possibly anticipated Bin Laden’s life and the giant effect it would have. The whole episode makes you despair about making predictions."

I would also recommend that you read Daniel Byman's article on a great-man centric theory of political science in concert with this.

Lucien Gauthier's response to my post:

Except for on the fact that emotions are not “policies, strategies, or tactics” is why taking up arms can exist as a profession, and why there is a difference between a mob and professionals-at-arms. As Adam mentions, conflict does not exist out of a primordial hate. Nor does it end because of a sudden emotional realization that there is some ‘better way’. There is a spectrum to conflict, the same hatred that can be felt for a mortal enemy is the same hate felt for the Shipmate who cut you off on 264 going into NOB. Both forms of hatred are dismissed through the same cognitive process as well — though the means through that process differ significantly. At one extreme only the acknowledgment of the emotion is necessary for it to quickly dissipate. On the other, is the application of violence by professionals. This is to say that despite the irrationality of emotion, there is a rational and deliberative process that ends conflict. That objectivity defines modern conflict resolution (note: There was VERY little that I interpreted happening to me objectively while I was downrange. Afterwards, in getting home, my objectivity returned to me). By looking at conflict objectively we have come to better understand the causes of conflict and have attempted to address our understanding of the causes through organizational constructs (NATO, UN, IMF, WTO — deliberative bodies) as well as methodical approaches (COIN, CT — tactics). But, in assuming the causes of conflict only as a function of emotion we remove any hope of conflict prevention. It is ironic that the sentiment expressed in the fake quote are actually an affirmation that violence and conflict are unavoidable and that humans are incapable of being disciplined enough to rise above their emotions.

I've bolded the parts of this that I think point to a better way forward.

Defense Blog Networks

Crispin Burke points out that the structure of defense blogging is evolving:

Contrary to what Tom Ricks laments (and Automatic Ballpoint echoes), I don't think that milblogs are waning, per se. Sure, total posts have slowed down, but many milbloggers are turning to Twitter for day-to-day interaction, link sharing, and up-to-date coverage of fast-moving events, such as last year's "Rolling Stan" incident, or the recent demonstrations throughout the Middle East. And while Twitter seems to have supplanted the shorter posts, many milbloggers have turned to guest-posting in larger publications.

There's another dynamic at work here too. The defense/foreign policy blogosphere, in contrast to the larger political blogosphere has always been tiny. Even the most popular defense blogs get a fraction of the hits that domestic political blogs do, because defense and foreign policy issues---always issues of narrow interest--are often discussed in a (comparatively) nuanced and dense style that requires some knowledge and/or experience to understand and critique.

Thus, it isn't surprising that a lot of conversation is less directed necessarily towards blog readers and more among blog writers and interested academics and practitioners who often comment on blog posts. Much of this conversation occurs in forums such as Twitter and Facebook rather than blogging itself. Some of the most spectacular blog disputes of the last year or so are incomprehensible without doing forensic analyses of Twitter exchanges.

To make an analogy that Alex Olesker of i-Con might appreciate, reading defense blogs without Twitter is like trying to pay attention to the rap game while completely ignoring the mixtape circuit.

Network-Centric Warfare.....and Pandas

I am late to the party that Crispin Burke has started again, but I have a valid excuse--looking for sponsors for the good Captain's Balling out of Control Center of Excellence. Now that JFCOM is closing, we might have to consult a NATO partner and two former adversaries for assistance. We might even get the Israelis and the Chinese on board, and finally end the Korean war while we're at it. In any event, when in doubt consult Silvio Berlusconi for the importance of Balling Out of Control for a nation's national security.

But I digress. Burke and a heavily armed panda have teamed up to dump on an attempt by a man best known for Bat Nipples to single-handedly revive the "vulgar" version of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW)'s hubristic view that C4ISR will lead to decisive political-military dominance. Only this time, it is expected to work as a means of monitoring the border between North Sudan and the emerging South Sudanese state.

Conflict Early Warning and Response is a growing topic of importance, indeed there is an excellent blog by that very name. What emerges from reading the blogger's survey of professional technical attempts and the scholarly literature is an extremely complex effort to integrate all kinds of technological and human sensors, historical and context-specific data, and develop methods for structuring analysis and creating effective systems for managing information.

Needless to say, such a process requires a lot more than satellites and volunteers.

Technology and Humanity

I have a short new Huffington Post blog piece on technology and the social media debate, mostly commenting on Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker story.

Science Fiction and Strategy: Why It Sucks?

Andrew Liptak makes a provocative argument--military science fiction really, really sucks. And why?

Military SF novels aren't about the institution of warfare; they focus on the effects of war, on the soldiers, on the morality of an organization, and on what humanity will do to survive. But warfare is much more than just its destructive effects: It is an institution with its own theories and reasoning. It represents significant strategic, economic and political events, all coming together in a destructive crescendo. When military science fiction focuses on people, there is very little about warfare, and how it is conducted. In these tales, futuristic warfare is often incredibly simplified, on both the storytelling level, as well as the actual elements that make up the story. Here are some of the biggest problems with representations of war in most military SF.

I have commented on some of the problems with a specific subgenre of this in io9 too. But the problem with Liptak's argument is that there is a misunderstanding of what fiction should ideally focus on. As experienced by characters, it is true that fiction will mostly focus on effects, with an ultimately shallow outline of the technologies and strategies involved. That's simply what fiction is. Some good science fiction does focus very much on the broader outline of the worlds involved, and I've blogged on them.

But the primary focus is the characters. A focus on the technologies, strategies, and tactics involved tends to amplify some of the worst tendencies of science fiction in general: a fascination with the technical details of machines or the outlines of future worlds rather than the people who populate them. There is an inherent tradeoff, and when in doubt, lean towards character. The contrast between the anime versions of Ghost in the Shell and the manga is instructive--the anime is much more about the characters whereas the manga is chock full of lovingly footnoted technical details.

Historical fiction, to some degree, has the kind of level of detail and thought that Liptak desires, but in large part only because the past has already been laid out for us. I don't think there's a strict either-or choice between character and detail, but at the same time a tradeoff certainly exists.

Facebook and the Database Society

I have a short new Huffington Post blog on some larger political and cultural currents surrounding Facebook and the upcoming Mark Zuckerberg biopic.

The End of the "End"

A lot of things come to an end. The enjoyable PF Changs Spicy Chicken I consumed on Saturday evening ended when there were no more pieces of chicken on my plate. Arnold Schwarzneggar's epic campfest Commando ended when the last screaming junta soldier with an enormous mustache fell haplessly from a tree after being shot. Some people's faith in true love ended when Marilyn Manson's marriage to an equally weird Rose McGowan ended in acrimony. My own admiration for George Lucas ended by the time the eminently repulsive persona of Jar Jar Binks crawled across the screen. So it's clear that many things and beliefs have a habit of coming to an end.

This basic fact of life has been perverted by the obsession that people have with declaring the "end" of a given trend, product, nation, or issue. Part of it is publicity--people want to be the first to declare an old trend over, which is just as important as finding a new trend. There was a remarkably cogent analysis of this tendency in either TechCrunch or Boing Boing, but I am having some trouble finding it in either of their archives (link will be put up later if I can find it).

The problem is this. It is relatively easy to tell when, say, a parrot is dead, despite what Monty Python has told you. After a certain point, it's obvious that a nation is "dead"--like the Holy Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, or the curiously named country of Upper Volta. But since the future, as William Gibson teaches us, is "unevenly distributed," it is difficult to really tell if a large-scale entity or process is really over. We should exercise caution in doing so. After all, where is my jetpack?

The Droids You're Looking For

NYT:

The skies over the nation’s capital are crowded with presidential aircraft, military flyovers and the Delta shuttle, but this month a strange new bird was briefly among them: a United States Navy drone that wandered into the restricted airspace around Washington before operators could stop it. Navy spokesmen could not say Wednesday if anyone on the ground was alarmed by the drone — officially an MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff and Landing unmanned aerial vehicle — which looks like a small windowless helicopter and was flying at 2,000 feet. The Navy did say that the drone got within 40 miles of Washington before operators were able to re-establish communication and guide it back to its base in southern Maryland. Still, the Aug. 2 incident resulted in the grounding of all six of the Navy’s Fire Scouts as well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy is calling the problem a “software issue” that foiled the drone’s operators.

I might not be able to keep using my "Science Fiction and Strategy" tag too much longer.

Science Fiction and Strategy: The Military Dream of Hideo Kojima

There are countless videogames that deal, in some way, with armed conflict---from 1980s Contra to the Call of Duty's Modern Warfare 2. But none rival the depth of the Metal Gear Solid Games. Their creator, Hideo Kojima, uses the games to present his own personal and idiosyncratic statement on conflict and the modern world. His fantastic world is not meant to mirror ours although it does comment on aspects of it in a fascinating way.

Revisionist Geopolitics and Information

First, the MGS series is in some ways a hidden history of the 20th century. In this history, what is important is not so much the actions of superpowers but goes on below the seams. This is not so much a matter of conspiracy theories as much as a conspiratorial vision of history that creates a background mythology for his series. Kojima's vision casts the Cold War as a tragedy. The original fallout of the "Philosophers"--the global elites who, in his universe, won World War II, produced the conflict of the Cold War. Moreover, the inability of the American half of this group to effectively rule without bickering eventually triggers the rise of another group that seeks to implement the utopian vision of its long-deceased founder. The key to realizing this vision ultimately comes from information technology, the birth of which is depicted as the child of World War II. IT creates a cybernetic apparatus of control that produces a twisted version of the harmony that Norbert Wiener envisioned in his work The Human Use of Human Beings

The politics of the series is not, however, the most important part. In fact, despite its themes of conspiracies, military strategies, and thrillers the series is perhaps apolitical beyond a cliched suspicion of entrenched power and war--hardly a new thing in Japanese videogames. Rather, the thrust of the series is more about the cultural foundations of the society the Cold War and the late 20th-century information revolution helped create.

Cybernetic Totalism

In Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots, the plot concerns the ability of technology to control, alter, and shape the basic processes of life. Kojima's view of technology is very similar to that of Jaron Lanier's. The nightmare vision that Lanier presents of "cybernetic totalism"--the idea that human beings are little more than patterns of information in a cybernetic system and cultural and religious beliefs are just biological processes--is reflected in MGS. The Patriots, the Philosophers' heirs in America, evolve into a distributed AI system that tries to regulate American life in a cybernetic fashion through the guiding and control of political and cultural systems. Control also reaches down to the biological level with nanomachines that can guide and control individual actions.

Again, the series' view of technology is not tied to politics but emphasizes culture. Kojima, through his characters' lengthy speeches about memetics and control, is asking whether or not technology alters what makes us human. Reality breaks down at one point in SOL and a character in GOTP can breach the 4th wall and directly interfere with the reception of your game console. The layers and layers of plot, deception, and misdirection, like those in Inception, challenge your sense of reality. If Kojima is citing Lanier, it is because he may wonder if the "cybernetic totalism" that Lanier decries may in fact be right. A more personal side of this is seen with the game's conscious heightening of its own artificiality, especially when Raiden talks about his empty bedroom back home in SOL. Alex Stevens of Ubiwar linked an review of the German film Das Netz that touches on this epistemological issue in more detail.

The Conduct of War

According to promotional materials for Wired for War, Kojima was a fan of P.W. Singer's views on robotics and warfare. The impact of technology on war is Kojima's primary military dream in the series--not special operations or PMCs per se (as game fans sometimes argue). If one accepts the premises of the world that Kojima builds up, technology completes the instrumentalization of force. The use of massive nanomachine-enabled command and control structures, ID-tagged weapons, and virtual training achieves a Frederician level of troop control that we know is impossible in the real world.

In MGS 4, the basic technological advantages of a modern force create an explosion in PMCs, not in the sense of private security but actual warfighting forces. The extreme instrumentalization of force inherent in the nanomachine revolution gives them a powerful advantages, cheapens their operation, and makes them an effective solution for proxy warfare and a source of wealth. As per Kojima's larger theme, technology also produces monstrosities--the "Beauty and the Beast" unit or the Gecko walkers (which bleed when hit).

The overriding conceptual flaw in Kojima's vision of warfare is that there is an implicit idea that technology somehow alters its nature. In the future world, war becomes something of a farce and tragedy, fought over little of importance. This is reflected in Snake's weary recitation that "war has changed" and lament over the impact of technological control. While this may fit with the cynical vision of the world he depicts in his cybernetic conception of control, it denies human agency (paradoxically so given his larger message of empowerment). Even in the context of the universe he depicts, force still is employed instrumentally and grows out of larger political processes---even if those processes may be complex or alien to us.

Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday

The problem with Hideo Kojima's military dream is that there is very little that is human about it. The layer of conspiracies, technological control, and political control it depicts makes the actions of the player seem, with reflection, to be just as artificial as everything else. This is a problem with dystopian sci-fi thrillers in general. If the enemy is so powerful, how has the hero won--or why should the hero win? The answer is usually a magic bullet of some sort.

However paranoid and unrealistic a vision that Kojima depicts, the popularity of his game series is a testament to his ability to create a world almost as richly textured as that of the Star Wars universe--a universe that presents an engaging hidden history of the creation of the modern world and grapples in a very complex fashion with the legacy of technological and social change.

Moreover, for all of the blowup about video games as a medium, I can't really see a story like this ever being told through anything other than a videogame. The layers of meaning, multiple deceptions, and the heavy emphasis on technology and human experience makes it inevitable that only the creative powers of a modern game system could realize Kojima's dream.

"Inception" and Technology

A good deal of contemporary science fiction, from Philip K. Dick’s hallucinatory novels to action movies like The Matrix, is based on a simple premise: technology makes it easy to create fake worlds. Inception, a movie about the use of advanced technology to steal dreams or coercively implant ideas, ostensibly furthers this paranoid cultural tradition. However, this conventional reading of Inception ignores another, more relevant interpretation: the movie is about the new, exciting, and at times confusing means of simultaneous experience in both synthetic and everyday spaces that modern technology enables.

When we use our BlackBerries, iPhones, or plug into our iPods, we are disconnecting from world around us to interact with others at a remove. Network theorist Kazy Varnelis points out that, in a way, this simultaneous interaction mirrors Inception’s participatory dreamworlds. This is not necessarily a new technology—as Varnesis observes the concept of simultaneous interaction in both natural and synthetic spaces has been a part of modernity since the invention of the telegraph. But the ease with which we can live in multiple states of space and time and the multitude of networked forms our distributed worlds take is a contemporary novelty.

Inception illustrates an extreme form of simultaneity. There is a baseline reality and a set of differing levels of dreams, each with different rules and different modes of time—all of which ticking by simultaneously, with action in each level influencing the other. This is the heart of what the “network society” looks like in practice. Seem a little extreme? In an era of massively multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPgs), “augmented reality” technology that integrates the synthetic seamlessly into everyday environments, or handheld platforms that enable students to Tweet their hearts away during boring classes, extreme simultaneity is fast becoming a reality.

Thus, it was William Gibson, whose novels focused intensely on the integration of the real with the virtual, rather than the Lotus-eaters of The Matrix, that proved correct about the direction of the future. Instead of a fake world constructed to trick us, we have a multitude of private worlds inhabited by groups of people that ebb and flow across a global distributed information space. The synthetic is not something to be experienced apart from the real. Both original and counterfeit are experienced simultaneously. Perhaps to some who have grown so used to Twittering and Facebooking from shiny new iPhone4s, synthetic worlds have become an inescapable part of everyday life to the point where the idea of simultaneity itself is arbitrary. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a time when simultaneity was not an inescapable part of everyday life.

What Inception demonstrates is that The Matrix's prediction of the future was wrong. Synthetic reality did not lead to an Orwellian future of thought control. Rather, instead of Agent Smith, we instead find ourselves captured by Farmville or Mob Wars on our work computers or smartphones. Our future is not of a disaggregation between the real world and the virtual, but a progressive blurring and merging of the two as the technologies of simultaneity grow more advanced.