09/29/2011 by Robbin Laird
The US is in a strategic upheaval over the nature of its futures and what future capabilities will remain after Afghanistan and the budget dynamics. A key element to keep in mind – if the US wants to remain a strategic player globally – is how to rebuild its power projection forces. But it is clear that it is not an old understanding of power project we are discussing but a fundamental transition of forces for projecting power for strategic dominance to a core competence to deploy agile forces to deal with black swans.
In the past two years, US forces have deployed to earthquakes, tsunamis, pick up wars, counter-piracy ops and a variety of impact points which could not have been planned in advance. At the center of every response were agile commands, agile forces and agile capabilities. The difficulty is that every response to a Black Swan further degrades the remaining capabilities. Operations drain the remaining capability of deployed assets. Leaders love to use the tools, but not to pay for their replacements.
It is more likely that Black Swans will continue to dominate our future, not 5-year Gosplans and insights from Commissions. To be ready for Black Swans you need agility. Agile commands such as have built around the TACC, or the MEU structure are essential. More flexible command and control as used by the French or the USMC in the recent Libyan engagement. Agile forces such as the Agile Response Group built around the newly enabled Amphibious Ready Group. This is the building block for the future, not simply maintaining a legacy fleet with “geriatric” capabilities. The new force structure built around leveraging new platforms can provide the needed agility.
The author of the Black Swan underscored that key impediment to learning is that we focus excessively on what we do know and that we tend to focus on the precise. We are not ready for the unexpected. For the author, the rare event equals uncertainty. He argued that the extreme event as the starting point in knowledge not the reverse.
The author in the concluding parts of his second edition advocated redundancy as a core capability necessary for the kind of agile response one needs in a Black Swan Age.
The Black Swan: The Second Edition by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House).
A recent statement by the Africom Commander that the Libyan operations were sui generis and not relevant to the future of warfare is a case in point of a guy who does not get it; the unexpected introduces change, one needs to embrace it and not conclude that THAT unexpected event is the norm, rather the response necessary to deal with the unexpected is what needs to be focused upon for force planners.
The key conclusion here is rather simple: we need to rebuilt our forces to be MORE agile, with more flexible C4ISR D and more flexible expectations of what engagements we are about to engage in. And shaping plug and play capability with allies and partners becomes SIGNIFICANTLY more important in the period ahead.
And having significantly SCALEABILITY with regard to one’s forces would be a core advantage in responding to Black Swans. As an event emerges, the National
Command Authority responds with what make sense to them. But then the situation evolves and the forces sent appear to be inadequate or the wrong ones. The deployed force can reach up and out to scale a response. And those forces can depart as new ones come.
One could easily argue that this will not happen the legacy systems which the US fights with have way to many stovepipes for agility, connectivity and coalition operations.
This a contribution to the Strategic Whitboard