Curbing Innovation / 6 / 6.2

6.2 WISHFUL THINKING BECOMES STRATEGY

The slight of hand that redefined asymmetric warfare, has also moved our attention away from the enemy. In the process, the enemy had been de-materialized and became a symbol, the mere target that passively soaks-in our strike weapons. Network Centric thinking no longer seems to allow him the right to decide for himself, the ingenuity to complicate our war plans, the audacity to thwart our execution of them, or the effrontery of trying to refuse submission to our will. The Network Centric concept presents an arrogant paradigm in which, by mere decree, we, and not our adversaries, dictate the terms by which the fight unfolds [1]:

We will strike across the breadth and depth of the battlespace to deny the enemy opportunity, defeat his forces, destroy his capabilities and dislocate or disintegrate the coherence of those operations and capabilities. We will seize the operational and strategic initiative, preclude his options, and deny him the opportunity to achieve his objectives. We will force on him such a relentless, cascading set of failures as to collapse his capacity and will to resist.

While this boisterous wishful thinking makes for good reading, one would hardly use it as the foundation for thoughtful military planning. As dramatically demonstrated by the movie Gambit, starring Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine, what other actors participating in a situation will actually do in the event is not under a planner’s direct control. For the reader who has not seen Gambit, the first part of the movie allows the viewer to witness the unfolding of a complex caper that Caine is planning to execute, but depicts it in precisely the way it would have happened had Caine’s plan unfolded exactly how he envisioned it; both his target, the multi-billionaire whose treasured Egyptian statue he wants to steal, as well as Shirley Maclaine, whose services he would use to get him inside his target’s home, behave as impersonal, stereotyped individuals expressly created to fit into his plan: the target thus appears as a credulous individual who has not the slightest suspicion of what is going on, and Shirley is a docile woman who always does exactly what Michael tells her to do.

The second part of the movie details the way in which the caper actually took place. The target turns out to be an experienced, highly suspicious businessman, who quickly uncovers Caine’s pretended identity, and Maclaine turns out to be a willful and undisciplined woman with a mind of her own. Under the circumstances, of course, the plan unravels almost from the beginning; the fact that the caper nevertheless succeeds, is merely a consequence of Caine’s extraordinary ability to improvise.

One learns from the contrast between the two parts of the movie that unforeseen circumstances will invariably come into the execution of any plan and that for these unforeseen circumstances the planner must either make appropriate allowances or rely on the vagaries of his personal ingenuity. In a similar manner, one cannot do away with the uncertainty of war either by wishful thinking or by expecting the enemy to act as the dazed rabbit caught in the headlights of our speeding high-technology car described in the quotation above. To accept the Network Centric view of the enemy is to elevate hope to the level of strategy.