The DSB study calls for the Pentagon to educate Congress about the problem and to create a new office to advise senior military leaders “of high risk potential red capabilities” and how to handle them. The new office, to be known as the Capability Assessment, Warning and Response Office, would warn senior leaders of high risks, come up with options to counter them, and recommend technological approaches, the study says.I’m wary of any approach that hopes, however implicitly, to institutionalize strategic thinking. Strategic thinking cannot be routinized, yet that is what one attempts if one tries to fix an undefined challenge like “unexpected threats” through bureaucracy.
The DSB also recommends that the Pentagon embrace red teaming throughout it structure… In addition to red teaming, the military must place much more emphasis on rapid fielding of capabilities and create a Rapid Capability Fielding Office that would report directly to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
No set of instructions, whether capabilities-based or otherwise, substitutes for having active strategic minds tackling a problem. It’s fuzzy and it resists an engineering approach, but that’s the nature of the challenge.
If this Capability Assessment, Warning and Response Office can serve as a center of gravity for strategists - a place where they can hang their hats and collect a paycheck - then it might be a valuable improvement. But you still need to find and recruit strategists to work in the office, which will require a leader with the autonomy to hire the types of people he or she thinks will help.
These people should be voracious consumers of information, excel at rigorous abstract thinking, and be conversant with the uses and limits of quantitative techniques. There should be a wide range of backgrounds, including history, operational experience from the military, business, policy analysis and mathematics. They must have some autonomy in seeking out interesting problems and developing them (along the lines of Google’s one day a week policy of independent projects). The office requires lifelong learners who look deeply at situations and wrestle with undefined problems.
During RAND’s golden age (roughly 1950-1961), new employees generally had at least a year to rattle around the company looking into things and figuring out the lay of the land. It’s a shocking proposition to consider in today’s world of hourly accounting systems and contract auditing. But it reflected a deep faith that RAND leadership had in its hiring managers. If they brought bright, highly motivated and creative thinkers together, they trusted that these people would do something worthwhile often enough to justify the times when they didn’t.
It all flies in the face of scientific management. We can explore new ways to managing this sort of organization - perhaps using tools like prediction markets to assess whether analysts are producing accurate analysis. But one cannot get around the need for finding the right type of thinkers. Otherwise, it won’t matter what their office is called or who it reports to.
