"When we hear the sound of hoofbeats, should we think horses or zebras?" So asks Gabriel Schoenfeld in her review of Robert Jervis' new book, Why Intelligence Fails. She ends her review by reminding us that "Those pounding hoofbeats might be horses or zebras -- or zebras painted to look like horses." Or, as the optical illusion above reminds us, the threat may be an altogether different one -- like a lion.
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As a former naval officer, I like to believe I have an appreciation for the national security interests of this country. There is, however, a bit of conventional wisdom I'd like to challenge and it is the idea that spending more money of defense automatically makes us safer.
For example, if we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary weapons and this excessive spending, in turn, contributes to our exploding national debt could it be that the growing interest payments to our Chinese benefactors will be a bigger problem in the long run? It is a classic case of unlearning by learning to see what isn't there.
Also, is it possible that our soldiers, in well-intentioned efforts to protect our freedom by searching out insurgents in Iraqi and Afghan villages, might actually create more future enemy combatants every time they inadvertently kill an innocent civilian? If we are to unlearn we must always hold in our mind that the opposite might also be true.
The idea of sharing knowledge and working among different agencies is undoubtedly foreign to many in the intelligence community; but it is unrealistic to expect even the most talented analyst to stay abreast of all the information, data and knowledge that is necessary to track, monitor and anticipate our enemies actions. It is only prudent that we adopt new tools such as Intellipedia—which may help alleviate some of the burden.
However, before the tool can reach its full potential, it is essential that those intelligence officers who are not contributing to the wiki “unlearn” the idea that intelligence can only be analyzed one way or by a small group of people.
Interestingly, some of the most eager users of Intelliedia are older intelligence officers who view it as a way of sharing their vast knowledge with their younger associates before they retire.
(For those interested in better understanding the power of open-source initiatives, I’d refer you to the now classic story of how Gold Corp tapped the power of the Internet to find $3 billion in gold or this intriguing story, which I cite in my book, about how a citizen sleuth used Google Earth to uncover a Chinese military secret.)
In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.”
Kennedy went on to offer a historical perspective for the magnitude of change society had experienced over the short course of human history. He asked his audience to condense the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history into the span of fifty years. Under this scenario, Kennedy noted that not much happened for the first forty years. Ten years ago, man emerged from his cave, and only five years ago did he learned to write. Christianity appeared two years ago, the printing press this year, and just two months ago the steam engine appeared. Last month electric lights, telephones, automobiles, and airplanes became available, and only last week did we develop penicillin, television, and nuclear weapons. To reach “the stars before midnight tonight,” Kennedy then poignantly added that Americans would have to “dispel old [and] new ignorance.”
Since achieving Kennedy’s goal in 1969, progress has continued exponentially. (Ironically, perhaps, with the exception of space exploration which, as Monday's 40th aniversary of the moon landing reminds us, has not made much progress.) Taking his historical analogy a little further, however, in the last proverbial "day" computers, biotechnology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome have all appeared on the scene.
What Kennedy's analogy reminds us it that will need to continue to “dispel old ignorance” -- or continuously unlearn if you will -- only on a faster scale.
Malcolm Gladwell has an outstanding article in this month's New Yorker entitled "How David Beats Goliath." It is an excellent primer on the concept of unlearning and I can't recommend the article highly enough. If, however, you don't have time to read the full article here's the operative quote: "When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win."
According to some scientific research Gladwell cites, "David's" (i.e the underdog) winning percentage against "Goliath's" increase from 28.5% to 63.6% when they play by unconventional rules!
Think about that for a moment, folks. What the article is really telling us is that if we want to win against a bigger, stronger and more well-funded opponent one of the first things we should do is "unlearn" the rules.
In 2005, I wrote a book on General George C. Marshall entitled "Soldier, Statesman, Peacemaker: Leadership Lessons from George C. Marshall." One of my favorite quotes of Marshall's is the advice he pounded into the heads of his junior officers: "Study the first six months of the next war."
It was great advice in the 1920s and 1930s (when Marshall trained over 200 officers who would later become generals during World War II), and it is still great advice today. To this end, I'd like to direct you to two news articles from today's papers. The first is from The Guardian and it discusses how the brain will the battlefield of the future. Among other things it discusses how drugs may soon be used as "pharmacological land mines," and how the advances in neuroscience could alter our definition of torture.
The second article reviews how the U.S. may be vulnerable to Internet attacks such as those which Russia is currently employing in its war against Georgia.
Together, the two stories strongly suggest that military planners should be "studying the first six months of the next war" because the next war is likely to be radically different from that which they are currently planning today.
A few weeks back I had a posting entitled "Change or Die ... Unnecessarily” in which I provided a few examples of how our inability to unlearn could, quite literally, cost some people their lives. Well, the other day, one of my favorite thinkers, Josh Wolfe, sent me a copy his weekly newsletter, The Forbes/Wolfe Weekly Insider. In it, he unveiled some startling research from a forthcoming book: apparently, six times as many people died in their cars from the 9/11 terrorist attacks as did the number of people who died in planes.
The authors don't state their research in quite this bold of a fashion; nevertheless this is one implication of their finding. On the face of it, the idea sounds absurd -- everyone knows only a few hundred people perished in the airplanes that crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and in the rural field in Pennsylvania.
Essentially, it is the author's contention that because millions of people refused to fly after the 9/11 attacks -- and instead chose to drive (which is demonstrably more risky in statistical terms than flying) -- an estimated 1,595 additional people have since died as a result of the 9/11 attack than is generally recognized.
If these people could have unlearned that their fear of flying was an irrational act because it caused them to engage in an even riskier activity, it is likely they would be alive today.
On a somewhat related note, I recently received a copy of a powerpoint presentation from one of the world's leading epidemiologists, Michael Osterholm. In it, he coherently argues that the United States is woefully unprepared to deal with the very real possibility of a major pandemic.
Interestingly, in his slides, Osterholm makes the point that it possible that more people will die from non-influenza-related deaths than from the flu itself.
How so, you ask? Well, much of the pharmaceutical industry utilizes "just-in-time" inventory procedures. In the event of a pandemic; major shipping, trucking and distribution centers will be hampered and maybe even shut down entirely. As a result, hospitals -- which already have a dangerously low supply of many critical life-savings drugs -- will run out of important drugs in a matter of days.
The effect: people will die unnecessarily. That is, unless, we can unlearn the idea that "just-in-time" inventory for certain critical supplies is not necessarily a good idea.
