Mick, your ability to synthesize the need for observation, learning, and adaptation for the military makes your articles a must read for anybody interested in understanding the current RU invasion of UKR and beyond to any organizational structure.
One thing that seems implicit here, but unspoken is how well can military planners, field commanders, and NCOs take seemingly disparate pieces of information and find patterns to learn and adapt at strategic and tactical levels short-term and long-term.
Much of that is cultural, as you have noted, and permeates down to the NCO level that allows decentralized decision making, and trust in that decisions making, to take advantage of immediate battlefield conditions and opportunities. Those lessons should flow up the chain of command as easily as flowing down the chain of command from the top.
Trust, independent thinking, and “risk taking” as you call it are all culturally driven. This puts a premium on critical thinking and an intellectual approach to war as well as openness to change and competing ideas. UKR and NATO training exemplify this. It is also no coincidence this has evolved in pluralistic, democratic. societies.
In contrast, viewing war as brute force without thinking (just watch Fox News to get this knuckle-dragging view of what the military should be in the US) and strict adherence to a one way chain of command where failure is not tolerated or seen as opportunity to learn leads to disaster or unnecessary losses and suffering. This tends to occur is authoritarian, closed, hierarchical, and oligarchic societies such as RU, Iraq under Saddam in more recent times.
What comes from this, from an economic and game theoretic point of view (as a trained Ph.D. economist) is the incentives created by these cultural norms. In open and pluralistic societies, the incentives and reward systems encourage reasonable risk taking and looking for solutions to problems at all levels. That is how one advances in any organization like the military. In contrast, in a society like RU, which is economically an oligarchy based on mafia like principles, corruption pays off far more easily to advance and make money as well as hiding the true condition of business, military supply, and military preparedness. To tell the truth, which is a necessary condition learning from failure, is punishment (if you saw it, you will be blamed for it). Hence, the incentive structure leads toward hiding the truth about actual conditions and to profit from it. The optimal strategy is always hiding the truth.
Thank-you for this essay, and for your other publications which have helped me to understand the conflict in Ukraine and to have a more practical grasp of conflict in general.
If you're revising the essay, I ask you to consider revising the phrase 'spawned in February 2022 by Russia’s invasion'? As you later point out, in the eight years since the invasion of Ukraine [in 2014], tho' they were difficult for Ukraine, the resistance to RF invasion helped the Ukrainian Armed forces to prepare for the all-out invasion of 2022.
Mick, your ability to synthesize the need for observation, learning, and adaptation for the military makes your articles a must read for anybody interested in understanding the current RU invasion of UKR and beyond to any organizational structure.
One thing that seems implicit here, but unspoken is how well can military planners, field commanders, and NCOs take seemingly disparate pieces of information and find patterns to learn and adapt at strategic and tactical levels short-term and long-term.
Much of that is cultural, as you have noted, and permeates down to the NCO level that allows decentralized decision making, and trust in that decisions making, to take advantage of immediate battlefield conditions and opportunities. Those lessons should flow up the chain of command as easily as flowing down the chain of command from the top.
Trust, independent thinking, and “risk taking” as you call it are all culturally driven. This puts a premium on critical thinking and an intellectual approach to war as well as openness to change and competing ideas. UKR and NATO training exemplify this. It is also no coincidence this has evolved in pluralistic, democratic. societies.
In contrast, viewing war as brute force without thinking (just watch Fox News to get this knuckle-dragging view of what the military should be in the US) and strict adherence to a one way chain of command where failure is not tolerated or seen as opportunity to learn leads to disaster or unnecessary losses and suffering. This tends to occur is authoritarian, closed, hierarchical, and oligarchic societies such as RU, Iraq under Saddam in more recent times.
What comes from this, from an economic and game theoretic point of view (as a trained Ph.D. economist) is the incentives created by these cultural norms. In open and pluralistic societies, the incentives and reward systems encourage reasonable risk taking and looking for solutions to problems at all levels. That is how one advances in any organization like the military. In contrast, in a society like RU, which is economically an oligarchy based on mafia like principles, corruption pays off far more easily to advance and make money as well as hiding the true condition of business, military supply, and military preparedness. To tell the truth, which is a necessary condition learning from failure, is punishment (if you saw it, you will be blamed for it). Hence, the incentive structure leads toward hiding the truth about actual conditions and to profit from it. The optimal strategy is always hiding the truth.
Thank-you for this essay, and for your other publications which have helped me to understand the conflict in Ukraine and to have a more practical grasp of conflict in general.
If you're revising the essay, I ask you to consider revising the phrase 'spawned in February 2022 by Russia’s invasion'? As you later point out, in the eight years since the invasion of Ukraine [in 2014], tho' they were difficult for Ukraine, the resistance to RF invasion helped the Ukrainian Armed forces to prepare for the all-out invasion of 2022.
Martin Arnold
Hi Martin, thanks. You are right. I will look to revise this wording.