Below Graphics as 2013 Story Board Short (PPT): SHORT 1-8
INVITE Robert Steele to Speak & Nurture & Energize!
1957+ Story Board Long: Decision-Support — Analytic Sources, Models, Tools, & Tradecraft 1957-2013
It has been a pleasure for me to support some of the bright minds at NATO ACT (Atlantic Command Transformation, the old SACLANT), and it has also incentivized me to familiarize myself with where NATO is today and where it might go in the future.[1] As one who has decades of experience with the US system that absolutely does not want to change, I have a healthy respect for the ability of the NATO bureaucracy in Europe to drown out any common sense that may come its way from the NATO bureaucracy in the USA, so I thought to have a go at making a case to NATO directly and SOCOM indirectly for coming together with the other regional and type theater commanders to ask of the Secretary of Defense an Open Source Agency (OSA) and all that can offer, including a Multinational Decision Support Centre on the shores of the Mediterranean focused on Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, with a second in Tampa focused on the Americas and everywhere else.
Mindful of all that has already been said or written on this topic – including the implementation concepts of Smart Defense and Connected Forces and the issues of the day (cyber-security and missile defense)[2] – I humbly submit that NATO has yet to address the substance of what Admiral James Stavrides calls “Open Source Security.” [3] NATO can strengthen partnerships globally by achieving intelligence with integrity. NATO, in alliance with USSOCOM, can claim pre-approved money (IOC 125M FOC 2B) for an Open Source Agency (OSA).
In my view, the three challenges that must be addressed with a transformation mind-set are:
01 DESIGN: Learn how to say “no” to the Americans, “yes” to the EU, and “let’s talk” to everyone else. This requires a transformation of how NATO thinks of itself, how it organizes, and how it makes decisions.
02 MONEY: Integrate at the staff level with the EU and become the hub for any other combination of nations so as to use intelligence (decision-support) to both spend smarter, and harmonize resources globally.
03 EFFECT: Create a technical and human factors model attractive to the BRICS and the regional associations, one that can be used to substitute local to global informed consensus for violence, wealth, time, and space.
Continue reading “Reflections on NATO 4.0 — Key Challenges AND Solutions 1.2”
Updated 29 July 2015
Robert Steele: Peter Drucker from the Grave
Robert Steele: Reflections on Desalination
Robert Steele: Killing Cops – The Canary Dies Too
Electoral Reform Act of 2015 — Our Capital Demand (Includes Graphic & Demand Documents)
Robert Steele: UNASUR – The Revolution Begins
Robert Steele: Paradise Found – Redefining Prosperity
Robert Steele: Reflections on the Next Data Revolution
Robert Steele: Kudos to Intel – #ConflictFree Toward #TrueCost?
Robert Steele: Reflections on China & The Internet
Reflections on US Decision-Making
Robert Steele: The New Story — Open Source Everything — The People’s World Brain
2014 Robert Steele: Appraisal of Analytic Foundations
2014 Robert Steele: Online Review Books on Education, Intelligence, Research
2014 Robert Steele – An Open Letter
2014 Robert Steele: Policy Makers and Social Science — Distant & Lacking Decision-Support Value
2014 Intelligence Reform (Robert Steele)
2013 Robert Steele: Concise Summary of Three Paths to a Prosperous World at Peace
2013 Story Board: Improving Decision-Support — Analytic Sources, Models, Tools, & Tradecraft
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on NATO 4.0 — Key Challenges AND Solutions [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on Alternative Command & Control (AltC2) — Five Questions and a Game Plan 1.1 [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele — Alternative Command & Control and Four Transformation Forcing Concepts [written for NATO ACT Innovation Hub]
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on Insanity & Integrity + Reflections RECAP
2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on Reform 2.2 Numbers for 30% DoD Cut over 2-4 Years
2013 Robert Steele Reflections on [Search:] non+traditional+threat 1.1
2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on the Inability of Washington to Think
2012 Robert Steele: Reflections on Healing the Americas
2012 Robert Steele: Reflections on Inspectors General
2012 Robert Steele: Reflections on United Nations Intelligence & Counterintelligence
2011 Robert Steele: Reflections on Revolution, Information & Civil Affairs
2010 Robert Steele: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
2009 Robert Steele: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both
2006 Robert Steele: Reinventing Intelligence
2004 Robert Steele: Reinventing Intelligence – From Truth, Power
I've been watching three areas the past few months:
01 Afghanistan and the non-existent exit strategy
02 NSA and the implosion of accountability in the US IC
03 Veteran suicides, active duty sexual assaults, and “the German disease”
From where I sit, the senior leadership across the national security community and deep into every corner of the White House and Congress, has gone insane for lack of integrity at all levels.
Continue reading “Reflections on Insanity & Integrity + Reflections RECAP”
The U.S. Army continues to be one of the most thoughtful of the services. Below is a superb list of responsibilities associated with the protection of civilians. Where the list goes wrong is in assuming that the military will have a major responsibility across all these elements. In fact US thinking continues to be severely flawed at each level of analysis:
Strategic: If the strategy is non-existent or corrupt to the bone, based on ideology or financial bribes rather than ethical evidence-based decision-support, it will inevitably fail in prolonged expensive ways because nothing done at the lower levels can overcome ignorant, arrogant, mis-directed strategy that refuses all ethical evidence-based decision-support.
Operational. If Whole of Government capabilities have been been developed that are agile, scalable, and truly represenative of all elements of national power, the campaign will inevitably fail (it may take a quarter century or longer, but it will fail) for lack of harmonization, legitimization, and the embedded inability to do what is needed in the manner that is needed (e.g. soft indigenously-embraced contributions rather than predatory corrupt practices).
Tactical. If the military is the only tool, and its insertion is bracketed by strategic idiocy, operational incoherence, and technical albatrosses (aviation, fuel-heavy mobilty, communications inadequate to “eight tribes” harmonization local to global, lack of language and culture skills), then however heroic the military might be in executing its often insane and all too often illegal unconstitutional orders, it will fail.
Technical: For 50 years the US military has been a pork pie. What we build has been determined by who bribes Congress the most effectively, and who offers retiring flag officers the most lucrative second career. It has also been gored by a lack of counterintelligence against religious and financial traitors, by a lack of honest design, honest operational testing and evaluation, and honest field commanders willing to blow the whistle as soon as possible. Four percent of the US military force takes 80% of the casualties, and gets 1% of the Pentagon budget. This is criminally insane and insanely criminal.
Since really waking up to all that is wrong in 1988, I have agonized over the broken US intelligence archipelago focused on spending money rather than producing intelligence, and on the broken US process for planning, programming, budgeting, and executing Whole of Government capabilities that are not at this time responsive to the public interest — they have been co-opted by the recipients of the public's revenue and are comprised of one-third waste, one-third treason, and one-third well-intentioned but over-whelmed good mired in a cesspool of bureaucratic corruption and political treason.
Below is an excellent list, additional commentary, and further references.
I have been reflecting on the past twenty years, and the remarkable resistence of the US Intelligence Community, seemingly impervious to all manner of reform recommendations, be they presidential, congressional, or public. Reform is not transformation. This from Dr. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking and reflexive practice:
Reformations and transformations are not the same thing. Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.
And now this from Ada Bozeman:
(There is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of knowledge is not as split up into academic disciplines as it is in our academic universe, so can intelligence not be set apart from statecraft and society, or subdivided into elements…such as analysis and estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collection, covert action, and so forth. Rather … intelligence is a scheme of things entire. (Bozeman 1998: 177):[1]
The recent NATO Innovation Hub initiative in leveraging social media is a tiny but potentially potent transformation starting point. It reflects clarity, diversity, and integrity. After an open brainstorming session that identified 32 opportunity areas, enablers, and concerns, the team nurturing the NATO Innovation Hub settled on three areas for focus where concept papers will be developed:
-‐ Education and Training through New Media
-‐ Alternative Command and Control
-‐ Social Media Users Training
As one of the early invited participants contributing to the process, I offered the below comments toward the first draft of the concept paper for Alternative Command and Control, and am now adding to that a section on four forcing concepts or functions for transforming strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations via the alternative command and control concept.
Coherent, the Force is….
Restrictive Control and Information Pathologies in Organizations
Wolfgang Scholl* Humboldt-University, Berlin
Although the relation of power to knowledge is an often discussed theme, a psychological and sociological scrutiny of the issue is lacking. A new conceptual and theoretical approach to this issue is presented here that distingushes between restrictive and promotive control. Restrictive control is a form of power exertion in which one actor pushes his wishes through against the interests of another actor. In contrast, if an actor influences the other in line with his or her interests, this is called promotive control. Information pathologies, i.e., avoidable failures of distributed information processing, are introduced as an inverse measure for the quality and quantity of knowledge production. It is hypothesized that restrictive control has negative consequences for the production of new or better knowledge, because it induces information pathologies that in turn lower the effectiveness of joint action. These two hypotheses are tested in a study on 21 successful and 21 unsuccessful innovations with a dual qualitative and quantitative approach. The interpretive analysis of interviews with the main actors of each innovation case as well as the statistical analysis of questionnaire responses by the same actors strongly corroborate both hypotheses. Methodological problems, theoretical perspectives, and practical consequences are discussed. The second half of this century has seen the transition from industrial to informational societies.
The coming century will see communication and information processing becoming even more important for the handling of any issue in politics, in the economy, or in private affairs. The amount of information produced is I want to thank Irene H. Frieze and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments as well as Iain S. Glen for improving my German English.
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wolfgang Scholl, Institute of Psychology, Humboldt-University, Oranienburger Str. 18, D-10178 Berlin, Germany [e-mail: wscholl@psychologie.hu-berlin.de].