Military Design Update
Frequent SWJ contributing author Ben Zweibelson has two military design articles out recently, as design continues to become an international affair. Ben has an article on the problems of traditional campaign planning where he uses the Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time” to discuss planning pitfalls. The British “Defence Studies Journal” through Taylor and Francis published that article on December 14, 2015 here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14702436.2015.1113667.
Ben also has a design article on the Royal Netherlands Army and their development of their design program in 2014 for their military education as well as strategic think tank applications. The Dutch "Atlantisch Perspectief” Journal, normally in Dutch and German language, will publish an all-English issue on December 15, 2015 at this link: http://www.atlcom.nl/media/nieuw/
Small Wars Journal is delighted to see the progression of design discussion become a true international affair for the military profession. While SWJ has published design articles as early as 2006 with regular contributions by design theorists such as Dr. Christopher Paparone, LTC Grant Martin, and Ben Zweibelson, design continues to expand into other military markets and disciplines.
Ben Zweibelson is a doctoral candidate with the Australian National University where he is pursuing a design focused degree in philosophy. He is adjunct faculty at USSOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University in Tampa, Florida where Ben teaches design theory. Ben is a recently retired US Army Infantry Officer with over 22 years of combined service including multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Comments
Military Design Update is a…
Military Design Update is a project that aims to encourage young people to pursue a career in the field of design. I think that it is a great idea and one that I would support. The main reason why I think this is because it allows young people to learn about the field of design and even get the chance to work with some of the best designers around. Go to this https://masterbundles.com/birthday-postcards/ for best birthday postcards. It also gives them a chance to gain experience before they start their own business or start looking for jobs in other fields. I also believe that there are many benefits for our society as a whole. Not only does it help create more jobs, it also helps us become more creative and innovative than we would have been without this program.
Due largely to the simple fact that civilian internet security operation centers are driven by uptime ie availabilty and a serious loss of money and or business from a successful hack ....if in the DoD, DoS, or especially as we have seen with OPM if something fails..it's someone else's problem as no one accepts or rarely accepts responsibility.......
IE my fingerprints sit now in Peking and all I got was "credit monitoring"....AND I still do not have my notification letter from OPM.
Again until polar bears fly design will fail in DoD, DoS or the WH... a much needed culture change will never occur.
QUOTE
Without any benefit of hindsight, since we’re still (barely) in it, 2015 stands as the year when the bottom fell out of our national security. When everybody in government and business seemed to be getting hacked and nobody quite knew what to do about it. Now, the cancerous trends in Washington, D.C. that birthed this unprecedented fiasco—bureaucratic laziness, incompetent leadership lacking accountability, above all a total neglect of basic counterintelligence—extend back years, even decades, and cannot be blamed on President Obama alone. That said, if you felt the president was slow out of the gate addressing how everybody—the Pentagon, the State Department, even the White House—was getting hacked, well, so did everybody else not on the administration’s payroll. To say nothing of how the Office of Personnel Management gave away the store, the most personal records of more than twenty million government employees, military and civilian, past and present. That said, it’s not fair to call what OPM got hit with “hacking” since it’s what naturally happens when you outsource your IT to Chinese contractors actually sitting in China. Thus did “we suck at everything” become the mantra of national security pros in 2015.
"Might be interesting to understand why it fails on the government side but it is empowering on the business side."
Likely due in large part to the fact that it was written by civilians and non tacticians. Would appear to be a classic example of the rift between strategic doctrine and execution at the tactical level.
We can teach the entire DoD, DoS and the WH/NSC design as envisioned by Ben but until the day the tiger loses his stripes and polar bears fly design will always fail.
Perfect example of this was the hype around Mission Command as envisioned by the former JCoS ---meaning "dialogue in a fear free trust environment"--and how far did that get in the draw down??
Mission Command as envisioned by Casey is not the Mission Command being practiced at Ft. Leavenworth, nor at the various training centers, nor in the DATE exercise scenarios.
BUT that said--where Casey and Ben have worked very successfully has in the teaching/implementation of these concepts in key network security control centers ---when employees, managers and directors fully understand the concepts and implement them you might be amazingly surprised at the results--speed, accuracy and decision making have all increased and with that confidence--- critical thinking takes off.
Might be interesting to understand why it fails on the government side but it is empowering on the business side.