In my last piece I wrote a little about myself, at once a humbling and daunting experience. In this one, I’ll address the figures chosen for Agincourt to Cyber War’s graphic header above: the battle scene decorating one of the many copies of Froissart’s chronicles of the fourteenth century; John Locke; Carl von Clausewitz; John Boyd; the anonymous cyber hacker; and the terminator. Taken together, I think these figures capture what I want to explore. So hang on and we’ll take a rapid tour of history and of future foci for the column.
Battle scene from Froissart’s Chronicles
Ever since my fourth grade teacher introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I’ve nursed an interest—for periods of time one might well say obsession—with our medieval past. From there it was a short hop to gaming, and from gaming to strategy. The roots of who we are today, as Westerners, was forged in the experience of late medieval Europe. The ideals of chivalry, expressed more as a centuries-long cultural debate than as a “code,” eventually formed norms and practices that, over time, became the code of the officer and gentleman, as well as forming the foundation for international law. The law books of customary practice in fourteenth century France attempted to codify these practices, while tradition formed a powerful set of beliefs concerning appropriate use of force in peace and in war, jus in bellum.
Much changed during the long years of the Hundred Years’ War between and France, fought between 1337 and 1453. The black death raged, shifting economic relationships that, with rising urbanization, challenged the earlier, feudal dominance of the rural aristocracy, the knights, squires and men-at-arms who were professional warriors, if not quite what we think of as soldiers. The long war taxed kingdom exchequers, forcing an acceleration of centralization of royal authority, prompting more conflict between the martial “elites” and the increasingly important “commyns” who provided a different kind of soldier to the battlefields of the Hundred Years’ War.
Agincourt, fought in 1415 by Henry V—and immortalized in English culture through Shakespeare’s play, in particular the St. Crispin’s Day speech—was the visible marker from this long period of military and social change. Military and civic cultures blended after a long period of relative distinction, and conflicts arose. Technology changed, as Clifford J. Rogers’ “Infantry” and artillery revolutions made armies more effective against the old-style fortresses. By 1494 the days of the old castle were largely over, as French and Burgundian troops rolled through Italy led by cannon and shot. This was a true military revolution, less than eighty years after Agincourt, fought with bows, swords and polearms.
The interplay between culture, society, technology and war is and had been a longstanding interest of mine, which some columns will discuss. The acceleration of today’s technology, enabling and perhaps driving social change, seems similarly dislocating, and is similarly filled with both potential and catastrophe, depending upon how we act towards one another.
John Locke
This brings up the second figure, Locke. Locke’s championing of the individual is representative of one of the key tensions within society, individual liberty versus community. Is it, as Star Trek’s Dr. Spock famously opined, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few—or the one,” or, in following this path, are individual liberties hopelessly lost under the press of direct democracy, and demagoguery. This tension defines events great and small, from the Cold War to the relationship between personal and social or even familial responsibility.
I find that today’s social media dynamic stresses established relationships in a way that can only be revolutionary. The very ways we interact with one another are or have shifted, and are expected to shift even more, stressing our conceptions of what community rights might mean, and how these are clashing with ideas about individual liberty. The long struggle between capitalist and socialist or communist economic systems touches on this too, so it’s more than just social. Even ideas of things like what constitutes social justice, hate crimes, or even repugnant behavior are being politically supercharged in a rapidly shifting environment. Here, technology provides the means through which we are changing our (and being changed by) our ways of interacting, though it is too much to say this is technologically determined. Our primary communities are shifting, seemingly based now more on new conceptions of identity than on traditional ideas. There is plenty to write about here, for sure, though today’s political climate makes it difficult. Within the column we’ll touch upon these issues through the long view of history, rather than through the news cycle.
Carl von Clausewitz
Famous within military and political circles, it was Clausewitz who wrote, “War is a continuation of politics (or policy) by other means.” Clausewitz, who served in the Napoleonic era, in Prussia and later in Russia, looms large as one of two key theorists trying to explain Napoleon’s success. His enduring work, vom Krieg or On War, is a classic read for any officer or indeed of any leader (read also my colleague’s work on his wife, Marie, who edited and brought his work to the world posthumously, if not post-humorously). The other, Baron Henri de Jomini, shares much with Clausewitz but offers a much more positivist approach, hugely influential in Western militaries. I know some of my colleagues will disagree, but for Jomini, war was more science than art, while for Clausewitz it was the other way around.
Clausewitz, by contrast, emphasizes the amorphous nature of war, the fog, friction and essential unpredictability and perhaps non-linearity of polarity, the principle of opposition in the person(s) of the opponent. We quote “dead Carl” quite a lot in the United States, but I would argue we are much less comfortable with the ideas of art than we are with science.
Predating these two thinkers by gulfs both temporal and cultural, Sun Tzu—as he is commonly if erroneously known to Westerners—also captures essential elements of war and conflict. As do other influential military thinkers, such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett for naval, alongside Giulio Douhet for airpower, the Russian Marshal Tukhachevsky and Alexandre A. Svechin on deep battle and strategy. This rich vein of exploration goes back to one of my favorites, Thucydides, the Athenian, who wrote resoundingly about war and the failure of democracy in the sixth century B.C.
The essence of war, conflict, thought and technology, theory and practice, forms another thread. I frequently find parallels and touchpoints between historically disparate events, and some of these are brought into crisp relief when viewed through the perceptive lenses provided by deep thinkers on war and peace.
John Boyd
In the wake of Vietnam, USAF Colonel John Boyd’s ideas about maneuverability, maneuver, dislocation and time have become a cornerstone on the Western and especially the American “way of war.” The “OODA” loop (observe, orient, decide, act), Boyd’s influential if simplified heuristic that has made its way into standard business, political and military jargon, focuses our efforts on time; though I think we underestimate the importance of his main goals, dislocation and dissolution.
So important is “getting there first” in our society that we may have taken what began and often is a virtue, and, by focusing too hard on it to the exclusion of other factors, we may have become “temporally myopic.” I have no solid conclusions on this point yet, but it permeates education, domestic and international affairs, military strategy, operations, and tactics.
But there are also strange little connections that go backward as well. In teaching medieval swordsmanship—probably my strangest pursuit—I’ve found that many of the key aspects of military, political and business operations are also expressed as principles in the use of the sword. Using a sword forces very fast thinking and decision-making, leveraging heuristics, knowledge, calculation and stretched physical abilities. The concept of initiative, for example, is one that dominates much from American football to political campaigns and news leaks. It is fascinating to me to see things expressed in the medieval period, sword in hand or from the “on horseback and in armour” perspective that resonate and are similar in the writings of a highly influential—and controversial—USAF Colonel (Boyd passed in 1997).
Boyd represents much of the connectivity backward and forward, and I’ll use his outsized personality and his equally outsized brain, as recorded in his briefings—as an occasional lens; sometimes positively, and other times less so. In a real sense Boyd is hyper modernity, or perhaps post-modernity, a swirling abyss of constant change, adaptation, or ossification and failure, at once awe and pity inspiring. We face this today—not only in military or political affairs, but in our personal lives.
The Anonymous Cyber Hacker
I already mentioned that social media is changing our relationships, but the collection, aggregation, analysis and use of the “big data” that surrounds us—as a water around fish, to use Mao Tse Tung’s analogy for insurgencies, is shifting what competition, cooperation and conflict may mean from the personal to the strategic.
On the personal level, our exposure to foreign hackers, as much as to corporate aggregations, form another level of challenge. I grew up during the Cold War, where, being a military family, we were engendered to share nothing, or at least only minimal somethings. Today, newer generations freely share intimate details of their lives within social media ecosystems, creating unintended effects and exposure to individuals wearing white shirts and ties, as well as black hats. How our data defines, us, empowers and exposes us, all simultaneously, I find fascinating. After all, I worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years helping to build some of these systems.
At the levels of military and business tactics and operations, cyber access can bring predictive analytics that creates the potential for unprecedented situational awareness, the advantage Russian theorists first discussed when looking at American and Western advances at the end of Vietnam, the “technical-tactical revolution.” That revolution revolves around the blend of ubiquitous sensors and powerful analytics, shortening the response cycle—Boyd’s OODA loop—down to what what some of called the “OODA Point.” Working with William Perry, the post-Vietnam DoD built a triad of systems that worked together—stealth, sensors and precision-munitions, that have resulted in today’s “smart” weaponry, like the Predator and Reaper family of “remote” intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms.
But such network systems also have vulnerabilities. On the individual level, the exposure of key personal information through theft, voluntary and semi-voluntary means give cyber criminals unprecedented access to our resources, and even our identities. On the tactical and operational level, the parry and thrust exchange of friendly and unfriendly hackers has been making increasingly bold forays into the very fabrics of our society—as we saw bluntly following the 2016 American election—and I’m not quite sure where this leads, but it is doubtless interesting and impactful.
The Terminator
As with computer technology generally, artificial intelligence in the form of advanced analytics seems necessary as a filter for the great ocean of new data being created in commerce, intelligence-gathering, and science. “Big data” and Big Blue can offer unique and timely pointers to trends and predictive power unprecedented before the existence of the data ocean. AI has captured the attention of the Chinese and Russians as well; the Chinese when AI defeated their most revered champion of the ancient and highly complex game of Go, just as Big Blue had defeated the Russian chessmaster, Garry Kasparov.
The race to harness the emerging power of AI is underway today at many points around the globe. Many players see this power as the key to the emerging new frontier of competition and conflict, so competition and even conflict is to be expected. Recently, the USAF’s Dr. William Roper announced the successful testing of an AI as a U2 co-pilot. Many services hope to bind their systems together into an “Internet of (Military) Things,” arguing that the connections are more important than the platforms they connect. There are profound issues of strategy, tempo, trust, and expense involved here that can make for interesting discussions.
At the potential end of the AI road may loom the surpassing of human intelligence by the machine. Battlestar Galactica (via Cylons), Star Trek (via the Borg), and Skynet’s Terminator all represent deep societal concern over the potential and ethical questions surrounding machine intelligence freed from the value systems of their biological parents, us. Some commentators argue that such worries are silly, since they lay far off in the future if they are possible at all. Some argue that the combined, unique human characteristics blended with the machine are the optimal. Some see futures as beneficent, machines freeing humans to think and create while they labor, while others see them as implacable overseers of a new caste system. Others see these technologies as necessary to launch a new phase of human existence, one were we venture finally into the stars. Science fiction examines these questions in story form, but I find the relationship of this technological potential, combined with the social, cultural, economic and political challenges immensely fascinating, and I hope you do, too.
Questions
At the end of every article, I’m hoping to leave you with a question upon which to ponder. In return, I’ll be thankful if you leave a (appropriately respectful) question in the comments below. These questions I hope will spark new columns, which in turn will generate more questions, as the road goes ever on, there and back again.