Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 4-08 – Conrad C. Crane – Parameters Summer Preview

This podcast offers a preview of the latest Parameters demi-issue and full issue.

Keywords: China, Taiwan, biotechnology, COVID-19, food resiliency

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Read the demi-issue: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/1/

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I have Dr. Conrad C. Crane, acting editor in chief of Parameters, with me today to talk about the summer demi-issue and the forthcoming full summer issue of Parameters. Thank you for being here, Dr. Crane.

Dr. Conrad C. Crane

Glad to be here.

Host

Always glad to have you. So, the Demi issue—this is a relatively new product for the Army War College Press. It’s released about a month before the full issue of Parameters, and it addresses unfolding current events and topics critical to our readership. It generates interest in the forthcoming full issue, and it tackles the big questions being asked today in the fields of military strategy and defense policy.

What does the summer demi-issue have in store for our audience?

Crane

We’ve got a couple of very interesting articles. The first is an In Focus special commentary responding to future pandemics, bio security implications, and defense considerations by a couple of civilian PhDs—Diane DeEuliis and James Giordano. They look at the expanding bio threat landscape, and they look at the experience of COVID-19 and the challenges that put on (the Department of Defense) DoD, especially. And (they) argue for a modernized improved preparedness and response system.

They contend that the COVID-19 experience revealed a bunch of weaknesses, including the Department Defense’s inability to sustain the military mission while dealing with intra-governmental expectations to assist with other pieces of the government. And it’s really going to challenge how we balance our resources. So, it’s an interesting look at the future, perhaps, of these future pandemics.

The second piece is a piece of a Taiwan Forum where we’re taking a look at Taiwan in this issue and it’s on Taiwan’s food resiliency—or not—in a conflict with China. The authors there, Gustavo Ferreira and Jamie Cartelli, are both reserve officers. They deal with some military issues in their normal work, but they really talk about the dilemma that we face with Taiwan is if it gets cut off, it’s got about six month’s worth of food. So, the question is, how do you deal with the possibility that the Chinese may blockade or somehow degrade their ability to sustain themselves?

And they really look at the potential scenarios and findings that underscore the urgency for US leadership and for military planners to really develop long-term logistical solutions before this crisis happens. So two very insightful articles, (going in) a little different directions, but really should give our readers something to think about. And then, of course, there’s more articles coming in the full issue when it comes out about a month later.

Host

Speaking of the full issue, what can we expect? Do you have any idea what we can look forward to?

Crane

We’ve got a set of very interesting articles scheduled for the full issue, starting out with Dr. Allison Abbe, who’s one of the faculty here at the War College. The title of her piece is called “Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security,” and she looks at this whole issue of how do you gain insight into the motives and mindsets of adversaries and partners? She looks at a number of different scenarios. It’s interesting that she talks a lot about this idea of strategic empathy, but in her conclusion, she says that the security practitioners don’t really need to aim for full empathy but for what she calls perspective and perspective taking, for her, is the most fruitful piece of strategic empathy. And she says that, basically, that that skill requires shifting in and out of other people’s perspectives, not adopting them.

So, you just gotta kind of understand what the other side is doing and shift. This frame shifting aligns with developmental approaches to systems thinking and how one views the system from the perspective of multiple actors. It’s an interesting discussion, again, to try to figure out how to look at these situations and come up with our own solutions. It’s very detailed. It also looks at how practitioners should use feedback to improve (and) how to use teams to make the effort better. I like her last recommendation (which) is that empathy researchers recommend maintaining humility and recognizing uncertainty. Even with all of this, where we end up is with a situation that we may end up being wrong, but we’ll do the best we can with it.

The next one is another Taiwan piece. Luke Bellucci has given us an initial introduction to what will probably be a two-part presentation by us. This will be the first part, which basically talks about Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States and its allies, and he focuses on Taiwan’s location is obviously geopolitically important to the US and its allies. But it’s even more important to relative to China. He also talks about the commercial significance of everything that Taiwan does and how it’s a beacon of democracy for people of China and other people around the world.

The loss of Taiwan’s democracy to authoritarian China would undermine our credibility with our allies and obviously have long-term implications in the region. So that’s really what he looks at in this first chunk of his work. Part two, which will come in a later issue, will review recent changes to the strategic environment current responses, including a hard look at our own national security strategy.

Next, Nicholas Murray has a piece that’s called “Geniuses, Ride Their Luck: Clausewitz’s Card Game Analogies.” And the interesting thing about his piece is he talks about (how) the scholars talk about Clausewitz’s use of card games in On War and in other places. But they use the wrong card games. They use our own modern card games as examples, whereas Clausewitz, obviously, is writing a couple 100 years ago, and he’s not looking at the same card games that we are. He looks at the different perspective that you get with Clausewitz if you use these older card games. The main games that Clausewitz really references are faro, skat, and ombre, and one of the things is you can cheat a lot more. There’s a lot more uncertainty in results, and he says, you know, the degree of cheating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, gambling and card games undermines any claims that Clausewitz’s card game analogies represent any kind of reasonable degree of calculable probability in war. Basically, these were kind of very unpredictable card games because there was so much cheating that went on. And once you’ve got that, that these are far chancier games, it really changes a lot of the ways that people have to look at Clausewitz.

If you use the right card games that Clausewitz used, then the perspective on Clausewitz changes somewhat. It’s a very interesting discussion. The thing that really struck me going through it was he talks about how much cheating went on in these games, and, for him, it makes it very clear the commanders had to be willing to gamble and take a lot of risks in in their approaches to warfare. So it’d be interesting to see how other people perceive it, and I’m sure there’ll be some pushback from some other researchers. But one of the points he makes is, you know, if chance and luck in war is far more extreme than was thought, and players struggle to make rational decisions because of the extreme emotion involved, then scholars must revise the way they might use game theory to model behavior. Furthermore, if there is no baseline expectation of honesty, then the raw luck and emotion is enhanced, then genius as Clausewitz describes it, becomes even more critical. So, I thought those were really interesting conclusions out of that article. We’ll see what kind of comments we get back.

John Bonin and Jim Scuderi, a couple of researchers here at the War College, have done a piece on the institutional Army—six case studies and changing innovation. They’ve gone back and they’ve looked at some historical case studies of institutional army reforms over the last 160 years and done an evaluation of how they (the Army) operated. And they tried to provide some historical insights to inform current practices to fulfill the Army’s articulated 2022 Institutional Strategy. They end with a very hard look at Army Futures Command and predicting how that might go.

I mean, they look at the Calvary Bureau and the Civil War. They look at the peacetime habits and wartime changes in the Army after the Spanish American War in 1898, looking at the next couple decades, including World War I—that’s a very detailed study. They look at General Marshall and the development of Army headquarters for World War II and how that evolves. They look at Secretary McNamara and the development of the Army Combat Developments Command and the evolution of that particular process. They look at General Abrams and his 1973 reorganization of the army after Vietnam. They look at the role of some of his key assistants like William Depuy, and then they close with this look at Futures Command and try to speculate on some of the lessons from the early cases and how it might reflect on how Futures Command develops. It’s a very interesting study. It says a lot about implications for the Army for today.

One of the interesting things I thought . . . in their conclusion, they talk about one of the problems with a lot of these changes is that substantive change and adaption have to outlast the specific secretary and chief of staff. The problem is we lose a lot of these innovations because the country goes to war or something happens (a different commander changes priorities). That the dilemma is how do we keep these changes active? How do we keep the Army from going back to the way it was as soon as there’s a change in commander or some situation happens to make the army change its focus?

For the last full article, Spencer French has a piece on innovation, flexibility, and adaptation—keys to the success of Patton’s information and signal intelligence services in 1944. Patton had this image as this combat commander and we talk about this very pugnacious Patton, but he was a very competent and systematic organizer. And the way he adapted 3rd Army for the operations they ran into in Europe, he had successful integration of informational resources, a very consistent operating concept for information and available technology combined with his organized mobility and flexibility and these are the same elements that modern commanders are also wrestling with. French argues pretty well that they could benefit from viewing patent strengths and 3rd Army’s accomplishments and how they organized this really cohesive and flexible system for managing information not only for managing our information but denying it to the enemy and how that aligned operational concepts or technological capabilities. So it’s a very interesting piece.

We have a new director of strategic research at the Strategic Studies Institute, and he’s going to take a little different perspective than George Shatzer did. George would provide some book reviews or some other things. Eric Hartunian, who is the new Colonel in charge of strategic research is trying to explain research possibilities, and he wants to focus on, particularly in his first effort, the Republic of Korea and the situation there. It’s the 70th anniversary of our alliance. He looks at the quick region with key points, looks at threats in the peninsula and, he looks at the little bit of the implications of the current war in Ukraine on Indo-Pacific security concerns.

His essay is not meant to cover every contingency opportunity that the US Korea Alliance represents. It is intended to set the stage for important research into the known and unknown opportunities that leveraging the US-Republic of Korea alliance may present as a joint force continues to March into very decisive decade.

And, in the meantime, we’ve also tried to expand some things. We’ve added a whole number of book reviews. We’ve had quite a backlog of book reviews, and we’re trying to get rid of them. So, there’s going to be more book reviews in the issue itself, but we’re also initiating an online book review section. We’ll post book reviews there as well.

We also need to highlight there’s a new SSI website coming . . . late summer, early fall. We need people to keep an eye out for that. It’ll be the same kind of place, but it’ll be a new look and have new capabilities and new things for people to see. And we think it really will enhance our ability to get information out to our readers that they really need to get.

Host

There’s a lot going on at the Press.

Crane

We’re busy. We’re busy.

Host

Listeners look for the demi-issue at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Doctor Crane, thank you so much for your time.

Crane

Thanks for having me.

Host

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