Welcome back, hope everyone had a good holiday. Quick admin note: I’ve graded the tests and will be sending everyone an email with grade sheet attached prior to Wednesday. Nice job by everyone; let me know wed if there are any questions. Also note the “resources” section of the blog has been expanded considerable with quite a few more articles on Pacom (per request!)
Our first discussion on wed will focus on theory and critical thinking and its relationship to writing policy. This is far more important (and influencial) than most people think. Theory often inadvertently drives our take on policy–rightly or wrongly. Throughout the Cold War, for example, it was generally held that if a nation had any “communist” leanings it was automatically a satellite of the Soviet Union. While in retrospect this turned out to be incorrect, most of our CW policy was written on this theory–to the detriment of national strategy.
The first article by Stigler notes the importance of theory as an underlyer for policy, and how it is devised. Pay particular attention not only to the derivation of theory and the support of hypothesis vs law; how much theory today is based on this? This is especially important in irregular warfare and asymmetric operations; is our theory based on what we know, or what we assume? Stigler describes a four step process in evaluating theory with regard to national security: state the theory, assesses the evidence, evaluate applicability, and consider contrasting theories. Note that while this seems simple in theory (pun intended), this can be subject to a host of factors you’ve already studied, mainly the influences you may encounter in the staffing process (viewpoints, service positions, politics, etc). This is hard–which is why it’s linked to critical thinking. Critical thinking is absolutely essential to a staff officer to be effective. In her article Walsh notes that critical thinking is generally conducted in three stages: a clarification of the task, the “finding” of information, analysis, evaluation, and delivery. In my experience in policy, the “finding” of data and analysis are the most critical (and most difficult) simply because of the quantity of information available to the policy maker–and bias that often occurs during analysis. This will lead us into a discussion of a number of logical fallacies the policy maker often encounters–and how to avoid them.
The second part of class will be an exercise to apply some of these concepts to a memo that Richard Clarke sent up the chain warning of the future threat. We’ll be looking at it in detail–and seeing how it could have been “done better.” This will be a prep for a short (ungraded) position paper for next time.
theater security decision making 