I walk my hound on a martingale and not a slip lead, but letting go has much the same effect.  If I let her go, she’ll run and not look back.  ”Cry ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war” is Shakspere’s way of saying that when you choose war as the means to achieve policy you lose control of outcomes.

At the strategic level this idea was attributed to another Elizabethan, Queen Elizabeth I.  If she spent ten thousand pounds on war with France perhaps she would win and impose her will on the King of France.  Perhaps she wouldn’t.  If she bribed the King of France with ten thousand pounds, however, he would do her bidding.

At the tactical level the unpredictability of war is at least as pronounced.  Friction and interaction with the enemy always produce undesired results; or as Forrest Gump memorably put it, “shit happens”.  The scatological angle is especially apt in this case, of course.

Pissing on the corpses of one’s enemies is an undesired outcome for US operations in Afghanistan.

A recent British moment was a bit more sanguine.  A soldier of the Royal Gurkha Rifles was told to bring back proof he’d killed a Taliban chieftain, and under time pressure documented the kill not with a photo but with the subject’s severed head.  This was no trophy-taking:  a soldier was doing his best to follow a lawful order.  We do send Gurkha soldiers into the field with razor-sharp meat cleavers, and we are vaguely aware that Gurkhas have been known to do something other than a charming and vigourous folk dance with their kukris.  Yet while we are very pleased when Johnny Gurkha puts a 5.56 x 45mm cupro-nickel jacketed boat-tailed ball into Terry Taliban, we find it a bit outré when one part of a dead man ends up on the company commander’s desk by way of documentation.  (I am told the head was returned for proper burial with the rest of the body.)

Beheading the dead is not part of the campaign plan for British forces in Afghanistan.

As atrocities go, a bit of micturation on the mortal remains of enemies already killed is mild.  Doing horrid things to live people is worse, and young men drunk with their power over other human beings do rape and torture and plunder.  Single men in barracks, wrote Rudyard Kipling, don’t turn into plaster saints.  Men on operations likewise.

Rape is used deliberately as a weapon in some conflicts, but it has been a concomitant of war and even peace support operations in all but a few cases.   Other violence against noncombatants likewise.

The whole structure of military command is designed to ensure that combat power is exercised effectively, and that it is exercised appropriately; but make no mistake, when you send soldiers to exert the state’s will you are sending them to deal death and destruction.  If death weren’t on the agenda, they wouldn’t bring guns.

The notion that soldiers, sailors and airmen are rather like police but wearing green is dangerously wrong.  We emerged from Libya with comparatively clean hands only because photographers weren’t on hand to document the effect of gravity bombs on young Libyans.  When you let slip the dogs of war, expect gore to splatter liberally.

Historically, dealing death and destruction has had a harsh effect on soldiers.  Doing so without a strong feeling that they’re doing the right thing can be especially corrosive to their military effectiveness and their psychological well-being.  Good NCO leadership, from lance-corporals to the Regimental Sergeant-Major, and good officer leadership, again at every level, not only keeps soldiers’ misuse of their power to a minimum but also minimises psychological casualties.

Abuse still happens, though.  Psychological casualties still happen.

When you let slip the dogs of war the results are unpredictable.  People die whom we don’t intend to kill.  People are made legless, armless, blind and insane whether or not they fit the Hague Convention’s definition of combatants.

Fisk of the Independent blames armies for being vile.  This is wide of the mark:  it’s not that armies are vile, it’s that armies cause unintended damage.  Tarak Barkawi, blogging at al Jazeera, hits the mark spot on:  governments make policy by exercising armed force.  They have to take responsibility for the damage.

The US Marines are a well-officered, well-led fighting force.  The Royal Gurkha Rifles more so (but I would say that since I educate RGR officers).  If the State’s policy requires that they go overseas and destroy they will destroy as ordered.  But the convenient modern delusion that the application of force in faraway places is somehow sterile is hollow.  The Marines on whom a world of unpleasantness has descended were wrong to urinate where they did, but the business they usually do with rifles and mortars and artillery rounds is far harsher, and their forgivable errors splash more vital fluids.

In which Lynette Nusbacher experiences life without her mobile phone.

It’s been about 48 hours since I packed up my phone and sent it off to HTC for repair.

Already my brain feels smaller.

Often, when I am chatting with friends or teaching or writing an idea will be born, and I will do something with the idea using a connection in cyberspace.  Sometimes I record the idea in the Cloud using Evernote, sometimes I record and share a pattern of ideas in the Cloud using Thinkingspace.   Sometimes I tweet the idea, putting it simultaneously out to my Facebook friends, my LinkedIn connections and my Twitter followers.  The idea, evanescent when entrusted to the 1300g of biological matter in my skull, lasts longer and, develops a life that spans the planet.

When I’m taking notes on students as they speak, I am writing their evaluations in real time.  When I suspect they are making stuff up, I factcheck them in real time.  When they use a bit of jargon I don’t understand, I learn in parallel.

When I was done teaching yesterday, I walked through Edinburgh to get some necessities.  Ordinarily, on my way, I do a quick search on Google Maps to find what I want, and go directly there.  Yesterday I had to wander.  Wandering and asking directions is pleasant when you’ve time to spare in a beautiful city filled with gregarious people, so it wasn’t agony.  It’s not so pleasant when you’re in a hurry.  Or when you’re thinking about buying a 3G dongle without a SIM, something immensely useful but, apparently, astonishingly uncommercial.  I thought about buying a cheap mobile phone so that I could at least phone an ambulance if, God forbid, I should slip on the wet windy cobblestones of Edinburgh and break a bone.  Where do I go to get a phone without a subscription? No idea.  My access to most of my brain was in a parcel on its way to a repair shop.

Marvin, the miserable Sirius Cybernetics Corporation android of Douglas Adams’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide books, whines about doing tasks unworthy of his “brain the size of a planet”.  He doesn’t mean that he has an enormous head, but that in some way his physical brain is connected to something much bigger.  Isn’t that what we do with the black glass devices that so many of us carry around?

It hasn’t been many years that I’ve had connectivity to link my puny meatspace brain with cyberspace, but already I feel the lack.

Admittedly the connectivity was never that good.  For one thing, rather than some direct connection to my brain, I rely on my eyes and my fingers as input/output devices.  For another, HSDPA never seems to be as blindingly fast as it’s meant to be, so if I’m not using a WiFi connection the slow transmission speed of my fingers on a touch screen is not always the problem.  We are in the early stages of enhancing our brains by plugging them into networks, but for some of us, plugged in they are.

Or, in my case, not.

To some extent I am a human who has been enhanced by an organ which connects me to cyberspace.  Just now that organ is amputated, though I can expect it to be restored soon.  Does that make me a primitive cyborg? Kevin Warwick, the gentle, brilliant, wonderful Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, is sometimes considered the first cyborg because of the various microchips he has implanted in his and his wife’s bodies.  Are we missing the point that Professor Kevin is just one among many? That those of us who allow ourselves to be enhanced by cybernetic connectivity are already cybernetic organisms lacking only better and faster means to connect ourselves to our cybernetic glands (if I may so describe my mobile phone), and to connect our cybernetic glands to the network of networks that is cyberspace?

There is a silence in my life.

Thank God it’s not a serious loss.  It’s only my mobile phone, but it’s a silence.

It seems that the otherwise sterling HTC HD2 I bought a couple of years ago has a design fault:  the wires which attach the digitizer screen to the circuit board run under the red button.  Press the red button enough times and the wires can work loose.  Without the digitizer screen the phone is next to useless.  By the day before yesterday I could only receive calls.

Why do I single out this phone by name? I certainly haven’t been paid by HTC to advertise their wares.  I paid good money for it in the form of a very pricey contract which included more minutes, texts and internet access than I could ever use (O2 were very happy indeed to see the back of me when that contract finished).  It’s because after a great deal of very geeky research I sought out this phone the moment it was released, chased  all over London until I found a shop selling it (ONE in stock), and one big thing.

The big thing is, this is the first mobile phone I have ever owned that I haven’t upgraded as soon as possible.  In the two years since I bought it, the hardware hasn’t moved on all that much.   There are phones with bigger screens, but they’re too big for my hand (I’ve tried).  There are phones with better bass or 3D video, but I can’t really imagine myself sitting on the train with 3D glasses watching movies on a teeny-weeny screen.  There are phones with faster processors than my HD2′s 1GHz, but the one I tried yesterday had a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and only 16GB of memory with no slot for a 32GB memory card.  Half again as fast but half the memory? Bad trade-off.

The glass smashed once (to smithereens!), and after using it anyway for a while I replaced it under my phone insurance.  It’s a risk when you buy a phone half made of glass, and now I keep it in a super-chunky Otterbox.   The battery runs down quickly from my constant use, but I carry two charged spares in my handbag.

But now I’ve sent it away.

Thankfully HTC’s warranty service is good and I was able to send it off with a prepaid UPS label today.  I packaged it up carefully in bubble wrap, an old mouse mat and a tough little cardboard box.  I kept behind the 32GB micro-SD card on which all the phone’s contents live, including the backup.  Also the SIM card, the battery and even the back cover of the phone.

The courier had to climb up to Edinburgh Castle to pick it up (thanks to Historic Scotland for letting him in free!), but he even came early.  I fondly recalled the days when the courier would take away your old phone and leave a new one at the same time, but the best turnover they can do nowadays is a week.

This leaves me atop a bare and windswept rock in Scotland with an eerie silence filled only with the sounds of dangerous winds beating against the castle walls.

My phone is very personal to me.  Although it was originally provided with Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system (since carefully restored for warranty purposes) it is flexible enough to accept Google’s Android 2.3 Gingerbread instead.  The 32GB memory card has loads of room for documents, music and TV shows (including the Ken Burns Civil War series, just in case you think I spend my spare time watching Hogan’s Heroes).  Also, I can stream video over WiFi from the hard drive hooked up to my TV (including Hogan’s Heroes, because I do indeed spend some of my spare time watching that wacky Wehrmacht).

I haven’t just hacked the operating system and filled it up with cool (and largely free) apps for entertainment purposes.  I use it for keeping in touch with my Nusbacher Associates colleagues, tweeting (using TweetDeck), writing reports on my students (using SwiftKey, an amazing contextually-sensitive predictive text app), checking Facebook (I switch FB clients as rapidly as better ones come out), texting (using GO SMS), IMing (using Skype), listening to podcasts and reading blogs (using RSS Demon) and reading (using Kindle).

I’m not mentioning all those brand names because I like mentioning brand names.  I mention them to emphasise that my phone user experience is shaped a bit by the hardware integrator (HTC of Taiwan), a bit by the chip designer (Qualcomm of the US — sorry ARM of the UK!), a bit by Russian coder Cotulla whose hack I use to run Android, a bit by tytung, who ported the version of Android I use, and a bit by each of the developers who created the applications I use.

Used.

My daughter has my last phone, a Nokia N95; and she’s left it somewhere.  Once I borrowed an iPhone when I had to send mine away (for that broken pane of glass), but I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t let me change the battery! Batteries are consumables! Buy a cheap phone just to save me from using a landline? Maybe I will, or maybe I’ll rely on Skyping on my laptop.

If I’m lucky the phone will come back a little early, and I’ll have it in time to go away on holiday.  If not I’ll be without my phone for three weeks.  While it’s gone I’ll be blogging the silence.

I’m going to use this as a moment to introduce cybernetics as a subject on this blog:  cybernetics as the relationship between people and technology.

My Sunday School students have a little three-note riff to signify ironic horror.  You know the sort of thing … dum dum DUM! I think they got it from the Backyardigans.  I did the riff myself this morning when I read that Naomi Wolf is shocked.

Naomi Wolf is shocked! Dum dum DUM!

Not, apparently, sardonic shock like Inspector Renault’s.  She seems genuinely convinced that I need to sit down before I read that members of the US House of Representatives have significant income streams from special interests.

Naomi Wolf argues for de-politicized feminism

She’s thinking of something more shocking, of course.  She says that the reason Occupy protests have been cleared away by police wielding batons and riot agents is that Congressmen are quaking in their boots at the prospect of losing these income streams in the face of the mighty wave of Occupy.

Did the Bulls use gas and batons against the Tea Party? No! Did theybeat up antiwar protestors? No! (No?) (No?)

No.

Wolf shocks us with the news that Homeland Security is co-ordinating a nationwide crackdown on Occupy because only Occupy knows that congressional fatcattery is a problem.

Of course that’s a bit disingenuous.  I’m not shocked at congressional bedfellows because its long been a subject of serious academic study, satire and legislation since William McKinley was President.  George Carlin’s been saying it since I was a kid.  Of course, the Tea Party has been on about it for years, though from a rather different point of view.

Tea Party rallies end and everyone goes home (or into Congress as the case may be).  Antiwar protestors go home (except in London).  People queuing for Saturday Night Live tickets go home.  What distinguishes Occupy is that  people don’t go home.  They build a library.

Senator Bedfellow

So no, I’m not shocked.  Were there were dark meetings between Congressmen and senior officials of Homeland Security at which a co-ordinated programme of un-Occupying was arranged? Were orders given from Washington to mayors and police chiefs? One waits for evidence.

Power in the hands of bullies, especially bullies who are not led by good leaders, is dangerous.  Poor and dangerous use of riot agents and batons is a problem.  Dumping books into rubbish skips is awful.  All these things are incidental, however, to what Occupy is and what Occupy tries to say.

Ronald Reagan used to scare the hell out of the Soviets. He was so ideological, so openly anti-Soviet, fanatical, senile and so extreme in the eyes of … well, pretty much everyone except Jerry Falwell. One Genesis video (jam-packed with cultural references now recherché) suggested that Reagan was, as President, senile enough to start nuclear war by accident.

From the point of view of nuclear deterrence this was ideal. A President who could be counted upon to order a nuclear strike, or one who could be counted on to refrain from ordering one, could be outmanoeuvred. A president who was apparently irrational could not be.

Bibi Netanyahu apparently irritates his G20 colleagues. That’s not going to lose Netanyahu any votes at home, and from a deterrence point of view it’s very useful. An Israeli PM with no Nobel peace prizes around his neck is credible as a potential button-pusher.  This is useful because he’s pitted against a foaming little pit bull like Ahmadi-Nejad, apparently held back by the firm hand of Ali Khamenei.

Much tosh has been written this week on the subject of potential Israeli attack against Iran. It’s not tosh because it’s inaccurate (though sometimes it is — the CEP of a Jericho is 1km? With a GPS-guided re-entry vehicle? Where’d Reuters get that — Wikipedia?). It’s tosh because it confuses capability and intent, ends and means.

Israel has to deter Iranian development of nuclear weapons, not only because the Israelis can ill-afford to trust their survival to a regime that talks about wiping Israel off the face of the Earth, but because a nuclear-armed Iran will likely lead to a nuclear-armed Egypt and a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia; and Israel would have a hard time sleeping comfortably with either.

Forever is a long time, and no realistic action against Iran would rob the country of nuclear capability until the end of all days.  Any military action conceived against Iran would have to succeed in reliably setting back Iran’s development of nuclear weapons a long way, perhaps 10 years.  Anything less would not be worth the bombardment from Hizballah that Israel would have to sustain, or the costly pre-emptive war Israel would have to fight against Hizballah to prevent the rocketing.

An effective attack against Iran would require destroying a great deal of dispersed and very well-protected equipment as well as all or nearly all of Iran’s store of nuclear materials.  Any attack that did not achieve this would be worthless to Israel and a boon to the Iranian regime.  Remember that Iran withstood Iraqi missiles launched at their city centres and are confident of their ability to sustain any amount of conventional pounding from the Israelis.  Withstanding massive missile attack is a proven Iranian strength.  A few holes blasted in the Iranian countryside? No problem.

Chucking sea-launched Popeye Turbo cruise missiles with conventional warheads in the general direction of Iranian nuclear facilities  isn’t going to do it.   It’s like trying to stop a bear with a handgun:  “If you shoot him you’ll just make him mad”.  Iran has a population of more than 77 million:  more than France and only slightly fewer than Germany, and its land area is more than twice that of France or, for that matter, Afghanistan.  Have intelligence services located all facilities? Could any attack be certain of completely destroying all facilities? If not, there’s no point in conducting the operation.  Uncertainty, inevitable in real operations, makes an attack a poor bet for the Israeli cabinet.

Any attack would have to be very, very precise, thorough and very, very powerful.

What’s important in deterring Iran is that Israel is capable of conducting powerful covert operations, special forces operations or precise air operations to destroy elements of Iran’s nuclear capability.  This shapes Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  If they get too close to an operational capability, they could force the Israelis into an attack that, however well- or ill-judged, could rob them of such an effective tool of confrontation.  Uncertainty makes an open declaration or demonstration of a deployable capability a poor bet for Iran’s Supreme Leader.

For Iran, confrontation with Israel is an end in itself.  Actually destroying Israel isn’t required.  Iranian policy requirements are satisfied by making it clear that Iran has nuclear capability and that Iran is pointing it directly at the Little Satan.  Launching a nuclear weapon brings the prospect of failure.  Failure to launch, interception at boost phase by Israeli weapons, interception by Israeli theatre air defence weapons or failure to detonate would all turn the success of confrontation into a colossal waste of effort.  Also, it would demand Israeli nuclear retaliation.  With most of Iran’s huge population concentrated in cities, a nuclear countervalue second strike from Israeli submarines would be devastating.

Netanyahu has to talk tough and appear dangerous and likely to order a strike, both for his domestic audience and for his Iranian audience.  Khamenei has to keep him talking tough and confronting.  Neither of them can afford to be conciliatory.  It’s a bit of theatre, but a bit of serious theatre.  Waving weapons around is dangerous, and nuclear brinkmanship is no joke.  What the rest of us mustn’t forget, however, is that Iran would face disaster if it launched a first strike against Israel and Israel would gain nothing from a partially-successful attack on Iran.

That's right, Mahmoud, I can just abolish you! - AP

We’ve had a few years to get used to Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and his shrill, rawboned brand of communications.  His grin, cheery from anyone else, comes across as wolfish.  His words on Israel and Holocaust denial rant across foam-flecked lips.  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has had a few years to get used to him too, and one gets the distinct impression that Iran’s Supreme Leader is a little bit tired of him:  sufficiently tired that he’s considering abolishing the presidency of Iran altogether.

Iran’s governing setup has deliberately diffuse responsibilities under the near-absolute rule of Khamenei.  As so many dictators have done, the Supreme Leader balances his supporters to ensure that none gains sufficient power to marginalise the boss.  The President of Iran performs the ceremonial and some executive functions of a head of state subject to the control of the Supreme Leader, and has a great deal to do with the day-to-day running of the country.  He does not, however, set key elements of foreign policy nor does he control Iran’s armed forces and Revolutionary Guards.

And now the Supreme Leader finds his President to be more a liability than an asset.  Confrontation with the Satans is, for Iranians, a successful act of policy, but Iran’s approach to foreign policy is more subtle than rudeness.  Iran gives a little to get a little, and the great elastic sheet of Iranian policy has been stretched a long way towards confrontation with the US and with Israel.  Although the resulting isolation of Iran seems to be more rhetorical than real, there are signs that Ahmadi-Nejad himself is losing influence.  While the councils of Iranian strategy-making are opaque from the West, Ahmadi-Nejad’s weakness could have been a cause or an effect of the operation by the Republican Guard or a faction thereof against Saudi Arabia.

So Khamenei has spoken about constitutional change.  This is not like American constitutional change:  the real constitution of Iran is the principle of vilayat e faqih, guardianship of the judge.  Whether the top man is called the President or the Prime Minister is comparatively unimportant.  Make no mistake, this is a vote of no-confidence in Ahmadi-Nejad and a warning that with two years to go in his final term he can be replaced with the equally conservative, very cerebral, very well-connected, very experienced and rather less shrill Ali Larajani, very much Khamenei’s man.

Happy as Larijani - Getty

Getting rid of the presidency also finesses the issue of stealing the 2013 presidential elections.  The ugly spectre of unrest would arise when Ahmadi-Nejad finishes his final term and has to be replaced in another charade of a direct election.  Electing a Prime Minister in the majlis, which is chosen in carefully controlled elections, would take away the reason for the unrest.  No president, no presidential election to steal, no popular protests at the election of a status quo candidate.  Getting rid of presidential elections will also rob Tehran’s charismatic mayor, Mohammed Baqr Qalibaf, of another outing in the national eye.

The timing of constitutional reform will tell the story.  If nothing comes of it, then it was a warning heeded.  If the reforms are delayed to allow Ahmadi-Nejad to finish out his term then it was not a deposition.  If, however, power shifts to a revived office of the prime minister in the next six months; it may be a good moment for Larijani and an embarrassing end for Ahmadi-Nejad.

Nusbacher Associates

Submission to the Public Accounts Select Committee in response to the issues and questions paper

Government Policy and the Capacity for Strategic Thinking in Whitehall

Summary points:

• UK Government does not currently work strategically and is unlikely to do so in the near future.
• The government’s role must therefore be to create, conduct, clearly communicate and discuss policy; and enable strategic thinking to find ways to optimally fulfil policy aims.

1.         The questions in the discussion document show wishful thinking.  They beg the question by assuming that someone is doing strategic thinking in UK government.  The reality is that apart from a few bright spots of strategy and training for strategy UK government departments are no more strategic than the least strategic person in that department.

2.         The least strategic person in any given department is likely to be the Secretary of State.

3.         In general, strategic thinking is not highly prized in UK.  This stems from our culture:  we privilege empirical evidence and empiricism in the philosophical underpinnings of decision making.  This has worked for us in many ways for a long time but this clearly is inadequate in a world where the interconnections, influences and politics of other countries are so very strong.  The UK thus must develop the capability to think and act strategically from the top of the Executive down through Parliament, media, academia, civil society, schools, pressure groups, industry bodies and individuals.

4.         Ministers do not appear to work strategically.  They respond to events thus sabotaging any strategic ideas they might have. This is not a party-political issue as the example of air transport strategy over last 60 years shows (see  Michael Skapinker, Financial Times 19.10.2011 http://is.gd/jND8kv )

5.         There is no single place for public or business to ascertain UK Government strategic positions, should they exist. The government nowhere meaningfully articulates what kind of country we are today nor what kind of country we aspire to be.  When things important to the British population, like the form of the NHS or cuts to defence, are discussed these strategic ideas should be at the heart of policy tests.  We the people also need to understand our nation’s strategy to assess how consequential are the actions of our Government, local authorities and other public services in all we do in the country and abroad.  Strategy needs to be made clear to everyone.

6.         A look at the Cabinet Office website for the Strategy Unit http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/strategy-unit is instructive.  This would be the most natural place for UK citizens to seek information about national strategy, yet today they would find absolutely no indication about UK Strategy there.  The National Security Strategy is not there, nor is the UK Cyber Strategy.  Similarly, it is unclear whether any government department has a clear strategy as there are far too many documents purporting to describe strategy.  For a strategy to have real impact it needs to be accessible.  Apart from availability over the Internet statements of strategy need to be written in plain language in a style that makes them easy to read, understand and recall.

7.         The UK Cyber Strategy, published by the previous Government and laudably continued by the present administration, is an unsung success:  the brevity and clarity of this strategy languishes almost forgotten three years later.  Page three lays out a clear strategic vision.  Page four lays out actions for government.  Where has the government published its successes or partial successes in completing these actions? Where is the layout of the next steps for investment in digital infrastructure?

Q6. Who is doing the strategic thinking in the UK’s role in an uncertain 21^st Century?

8.          The 21^st Century is full of uncertainty, but not necessarily more than the 14^th or the 20^th.  Phrases like “our rapidly changing world” and “an uncertain 21^st Century” are excuses for intellectually living hand-to-mouth.  Those who think from crisis to crisis find the world around them uncertain because they have no strategy to guide them.

9.          Strategy is, in classical theory, the means to achieving a policy aim.  It is a path to get from where we are to where, according to policy, we want or need to be.  This structured approach enables systematic strategic thinking and planning.

10.        In UK Government strategy occupies an uncertain place with respect to policy.  The policy profession within the civil service deems policy to be subordinate to strategy, a reversal of the classical concept of strategy.  In the hurly-burly of public administration where strategy is often absent policy serves a notional strategy.

11.         The habit of strategic thinking is the habit of asking, “in order to do what?” That is, cultivating the active expectation that any action is meant to achieve a higher-order aim with clearly articulated policy the highest-order set of aims.

12.        Sound strategic thinking involves examining plans to ask not only what the aim is, but moreover whether a given action will indeed achieve the aim and whether a given action is the most economical of effort in doing so.

13.         In the absence of habits of strategic thinking, the phenomenon labelled strategy is no more than expediency.  Strategy is purely instrumental to the perceived needs of the day.

14.         “Day” is no exaggeration:  ministers respond to the demands of a 24-hour news cycle.  Looking as far forward as the next election is rare.  Looking more than five years forward is unheard-of.  The effect of this can be seen in the UK’s lack of national infrastructure strategy, national industrial strategy or national energy strategy.  Years ago a previous government suggested that government operate in a “joined-up” fashion.  This is a good idea, but joined-up operating is just part of joined-up thinking.

How do developments in cyber, technology and social media affect all these discussions?

15.        Lack of strategic thinking and working exposes the UK to costs.  For instance, the lack of a strong national narrative on cyber threat means that the country blithely accepts swingeing losses to cyber crime.  The latest FCO sources give the following figures related to cyber:

a.  UK web-based industry = £100 billion (8% of UK GDP);

b.  global e-commerce = $8 trillion; and

c.  cyber-crime costs $1 trillion per year = 12.5% of global e-commerce.  (see Rt Hon William Hague MP article in Der Spiegel, 18.10.2011 http://is.gd/epPVE6 )

To get the scale of cyber crime alone it is enough to note that it is three times as large as the Eurozone’s temporary €440bn rescue fund (see Financial Times, 20.10.2011 http://is.gd/F0IOqB)

16.        One of the challenges and opportunities of strategic thinking is ensuring that policy suits the wants and needs of the country rather than wants and needs constructed for the country.  Social media, in breaking away from mediation, empowering the individual and creating virtual communities, provides an opportunity for two-way communication between government and the publics that make up the United Kingdom.

Q7. What is the role of the UK Government in leading, enabling and delivering strategic thinking?

17.        For UK government to lead in strategic thinking it must provide an example.  We have noted above in paragraph 4 that ministers do not work strategically, their departments do not work strategically; moreover there seems to be little sign that this will change.  Should government take upon itself the mantle of leadership and excellence in strategic thinking, it will very likely become one more apparent dishonesty on the part of politicians or one more apparent mendacity on the part of civil servants.  Because UK government is unlikely to take a leadership position, someone other than government must lead and deliver strategic thinking.

18.        What remains, then, is the government’s role:  to enable strategic thinking and to support it with the public and in Parliament.

Are there roles that need to be done by UK Government alone?

19.        Government must impose democratic and expert scoping and direction by creating policy:  the aims which will be achieved by strategy.

20.        It is government’s part to voice aspirations for the country and its people, setting out visions of where the UK will need to be in years to come.  Political party manifestos, think tanks and pressure groups will contribute visions and aspirations which are absorbed into government policy by democratic means.  Government must communicate rationale and meaning for aspirations, and continuously discuss and test these issues with the public.

21.        Only government can reconcile wants and needs in making decisions on allocation of resources.

22.        Only government can demand that strategy must be woven into whatever the public sector does by seeking to embed strategic thinking in the ordinary working of government.

23.        Government, as a collector of information, must be open to ensure that citizens’ responsibilities are supported with relevant data.

Should the Government enable … businesses and civil society … to play a greater role in making, shaping and delivering policies?

24.       This question asks, in essence, should there be politics outside the closed corridors of political parties and central government ministries, and the answer is ‘yes’.

LILLY EVANS PhD Dipl Ing

FOR NUSBACHER ASSOCIATES

Lilly.Evans@nusbacher.com

http://nusbacher.com

As the Prime Minister says, I share in the joy and relief at the release of Sgt Gilad Shalit of the IDF today.  As a parent, the idea of five years’ nightmarish uncertainty appals me.  As a sometime soldier, the idea of being pulled out of the techie world of combined-arms manoeuvre and dragged through a tunnel into the world of terror and insurgency makes me shudder.

A very thin but very free Shalit

I share in this joy and relief with a bit of a chill down my spine.  In discussing the fate of Shalit over the past five years I have said again and again that a lopsided prisoner exchange to free Shalit would compound the tactical failure of Shalit’s unit to maintain its local security all those years ago and turn it into a strategic failure.  I would have advised Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu to look Hamas in the eye and say, “he is a soldier, and we look forward to his repatriation at the conclusion of hostilities”.

Of course, unlike Bibi I have not had to look into his parents’ eyes.  Of such things are political decisions made:  soldiers’ lives and parents’ eyes.

Netanyahu took the defeat well, conceding the round to Hamas.  Letting a thousand people go who may decide to resume violent action against Israel is a risk that he and his officials will have to manage over the years to come.  So goes defeat.

Marwan Barghouti

The victors in this are Hamas.  The operation that captured Shalit may have involved more than one organisation (including Fatah), but the victory belongs to Hamas.  This is not only because Hamas gets the glory of releasing a thousand prisoners from Israeli gaols (who will, I’m guessing, look better fed than Shalit looks today).  It is because of the one Israel did not release.

Marwan Barghouti is in prison in Israel serving five consecutive life sentences for murder.  He is a senior Fatah leader who came up, not through the years of running Fatahland in Lebanon and living well in Tunis, but through locally organising the First Intifadah of 1987-1993.  He had the street cred to call out the soft old men of the PLO for running Palestine like a fiefdom, and that made him even more of a threat, not only to Israel but to Hamas (which must dread the idea of a strong, credible, honest Fatah leader) and to Abu Mazen, the president of Palestine who represents everything Barghouti has fought against.

A free Barghouti would be a threat to Israel, a threat to Hamas’s barely challenged position as the only effective opposition to Israel in a polity which values opposition to Israel above all, and a threat to Abu Mazen.  Keeping him locked up was to some extent a win for Netanyahu (though many non-Israelis view Barghouti as a Nixon:  the only Palestinian leader tough enough to make peace between Hamas, Fatah and Israel without losing all credibility).  It was a win for Abu Mazen who gets to run his failed state a little while longer.  It was, above all, a win for Hamas.

The question now is how Hamas will exploit this victory.

As I’ve written before, Hamas must keep up confrontation with the Israelis, and must make a move to take control of the West Bank.  From a position of strength, their best way to do this would be a grassroots approach in the West Bank leading to new parliamentary elections and a medium-term hudna with their new negotiating partner, Israel.  It isn’t like Hamas to miss an opportunity.

Let us stipulate that using kinetic attacks on Libya was right and using cyber attack would have been wrong.  After all, using a poorly understood means to achieve national security aims could be unwise.  After all, using cyber attack as a strategic weapon would have unintended results.

Question:  How much more did kinetic means cost? Not in cash for fuel and ammunition so much as lives and trauma.

This post is appearing simultaneously in the Huffington Post.

The very senior civil servant asked, “have you considered another way to do this?”

The Battle Group Commander bit down on his instinctive reply, “yes, of course I did, you sardonic bastard.”

A gulf in understanding and appreciation of war in cities was exposed.  The exercise organisers were pleased.

The bloody violence that tore through the centre of Southampton, a port city of  a quarter million people on England’s south coast, was all virtual, of course.  I had magicked 250 school children and a mobile phone cell onto the top floor of a high-rise construction site, the work of hardcore (though fictional) Ninka insurgents and their military allies from over the border.  Hundreds of other Ninka kids were all over the neighbourhood with their mobile phones, texting the location of the British troops sent to clear the insurgents away.

A bright young officer of Fusiliers, a real battalion commander borrowed for the exercise, had the task of using his tanks and armoured infantry to roar past Ikea and, with the assistance of attack helicopters, Joint Strike Fighter and unspecified electronic wizardry; defeat my inventions.  His real Challenger II tanks and Warrior infantry fighting vehicles were miles away on Salisbury Plain, as notional that windy Thursday in Southampton as the missile teams I had carefully positioned to slam warheads into his tanks’ thinner side and rear armour.

The Ninkas he fought, canny guerrila fighters in the Hizballah model, are the brainchild of Kristian Gustafson, an academic in the intelligence studies programme at Brunel University and a Territorial Army officer.  The commander’s advisors that day included a policy wonk from the Ministry of Defence’s centre in Whitehall, the commander of the French Army’s urban operations school, a clever tank officer from the People’s Cavalry, an artillery targeteer, army and RAF pilots and American urban warfare guru Russell Glenn.  There would be no groupthink on this exercise.

The fusilier officer and I were conducting a seminar wargame in a multistory carpark.  Some of the most senior civil servants from the Ministry of Defence; some in their Whitehall gabardines and some, including the MOD’s Finance Director, in well-worn fleece; were our shivering audience.  On another parking level was a group of generals and brigadiers working through a similar problem.  The top soldiers had advice from the reliably contrarian Professor Mary Kaldor.

Afterward, in a camouflaged briefing theatre pitched under canvas at Marchwood Military Port, the discussion was polite but intense. The practicalities of smoking people out of a modern high-rise block were debated.  ”This is a mediaeval attack on a fortress,” cried an officer from the Household Cavalry. Nobody laughed at the irony.  For days the middle-ranking officers had been ground down by the brutal realities of urban combat.  Every time they tried to ignore the thousands of civilians milling around their area of operations, realtime images from the City of Southampton’s network of closed-circuit TV cameras reminded them.

Later in the day, as the wind off Southampton Water whipped the camouflage netting over the tent, a hundred senior officers, mostly brigadiers and generals, debated whether the Army needs to fundamentally change itself from a rural-oriented force to an urban-oriented force. This is no small question for an army that has been operating in the villages and compounds of Afghanistan’s rural Green Zone for years and which has urban training areas that look like Serb hill villages and British suburbs, not teeming subtropical cities.

For the British Army, hierarchical and reflexively anti-intellectual, this sort of discussion is hard to create.  For the third round of Exercise Urban Warrior Brigadier Tim Robinson used the headquarters of his 1 (UK) Mechanised Brigade as a virtual experimental brigade.  For days he exposed himself and his staff to thrice-daily grillings and discussions in his tented arena.

A building across the port was filled with officers and soldiers from the manoeuvre units of Brigadier Tim’s brigade, fighting the imaginary battle by email and conducting sidebar seminars on aspects of urban operations.  One table was reserved for THREATCON, the grizzled gunner colonel and perky major of Royal Signals who played the commanders of the enemy force.  Beside them was a chief inspector from Hampshire Police, playing the local top cop.  A Territorial Army half-colonel, expert in information operations, represented the civilian population.

The exercise was harsh and unforgiving.  The wargame geek from Defence Science and Technology Laboratories (DSTL), with the ponytail that is practically a badge of his profession, mercilessly taxed not only the brigade commander but also his political advisor and stabilisation advisor with the realities of weapons developments we expect to see in ten years’ time.  Over strong Army tea, military historian Toby McLeod, borrowed from the University of Birmingham, debated with the DSTL operational analysts and the staff anthropologist whether the ruins of Southampton would work more like those of Grozny or Stalingrad.  A young staff officer from Director Special Forces respectfully explained, again and again, that this operation just wasn’t important enough for the immediate attention of the SAS and SBS but that the brigade commander’s request was in a queue and would be answered by the next available sabre squadron.

Operating in a city is a real horror for soldiers, especially humane soldiers.  For our officers, many of whom experienced the long defeat in Basrah, the idea of stability operations in a city is bad enough; the idea of fighting full-scale warfare, “war amongst the people” is dreadful to contemplate.  A week in Southampton doing just that dreadful contemplation showed the soldiers that doctrine, training and procedures need to be developed to make success at this kind of warfare possible by 2020.

But over and again the question arose:  why would anyone want to do this? Why not stick to the current convention of inking urban areas in black on planning maps and just staying away? Here we come to the reason for the exercise. Cities around the world are swelling with migrants from the countryside, especially cities by the sea. Youth bulge, competition for resources and proliferation of conventional weapons make the likelihood of problems in dense littoral cities ever higher, and more problems means more conflict.  More conflict means more chance that the British Army will find itself forced to fight in a city.

The recent fighting in Libya’s coastal cities fits into this pattern, and Lieutenant-General Paul Newton, the Army’s Commander of Force Development and Training, is betting that the Army has to be ready for it.  By starting now, setting soldier-scholars in the Petraeus mold to envisioning, developing and training the force we’ll need after we disengage from Afghanistan, Newton hopes to resist the temptation to prepare for the last war and give us an army in 2020 that’s ready for 2020.

For the Armed Forces, a trip to dense littoral cities is dreaded like a trip to the dentist, but exercises like Urban Warrior show they are aware of the requirement.  For politicians; notoriously myopic when forced to look forward more than a day, a month or an election; an understanding of the costs and dangers of sending soldiers to fight in cities will be harder to achieve.  Nobody will force ministers like our new Secretary of State for Defence to fly slowly around Southampton in a helicopter, contemplating refugee flows from Southampton Common towards the bridges over the Itchen and Test.  Nobody will robustly question their assumptions, and if past behaviour of senior officers is any guide then nobody will tell ministers to get stuffed when they send soldiers to fight amongst the population of some dense city.

When the steely-eyed young Battle Group Commander sketched out his plan for attacking through the centre of Southampton he knew that he had to act quickly to stop a long, drawn-out battle that would kill and destroy even more people.

“Ministers would never let you hand the enemy that kind of propaganda coup,” said the very senior civil servant.  He was right.  Among the gaps that need to be bridged before Britain’s armed forces are ready to fight the wars of the future is the gulf of understanding between ministers and soldiers.