Search

Information is all the world, and all the world is information. Every military action or inaction is based on information. Military transformation and modernization programs are focused on leveraging information as a battle-winning capability. The future, we read everywhere, is all about information. Modern military forces have never been so good or so fast at collecting it, processing it, sending it and sharing it at all levels, and that is where the problem lies. By investing so heavily in collecting, processing, sending and sharing information they have fallen behind on conceptualizing information itself, and investigating how they might exploit it better. They are in danger of failing to avoid a range of unseen vulnerabilities associated with using information without the degree of self-awareness that the modern battlespace demands. This paper will expose this central problem using the recent experiences of British and American forces in Iraq between 20 March and 9 April 2003. Responding to much of the same information in the same environment, the two forces conducted quite different operations. The reason was simple; they both used information in an entirely predictable way, dictated more by their prevailing organizational cultures and institutional repertoires than by any other single factor. Lack of understanding of these underlying concepts of information has the potential to ensure that transformation will only ever occur in name and that an intelligent and adaptive enemy will continue to be able to exploit the organizational vulnerabilities of both forces. A full and rigorous conceptual understanding of information is a vital, and overlooked, component of a future battle-winning force.

Bias caused by organizational culture is a constant companion of military planning. Cognitive models dominated by Newtonian, mechanistic, and reductionist thinking, have all but entrenched bias at the operational level of war where contextual, or environmental, orientation to a rival is rarely more than an unthinking or ideological mirage. The results are brittle campaign plans that are broadly predictable by any thinking competitor. Systemic Operation Design claims to address this major problem by re-orienting users to each unique problem that they face. It rejects the unconscious application of previous experiences and cognitive templates as a dangerous trap that is more likely to produce incoherent and flawed actions, than effective operational art and science. A holistic approach, based on seven rounds of recorded (or textualized) discourse, it seeks to self-consciously, cognitively orient users to the problem at hand, before investigating the logic underlying the form of the system that connects them to a given rival entity. Instead of working in reverse from teleological, mechanistic, rigid, and pre-determined strategic end-states to possible actions likely to deliver them, the approach seeks to frame the logical terms for planning to begin, while recognizing that the most likely outcome of a given action is a series of new emergences that will alter the dynamic and adaptive system (in turn necessitating a cognitive re-structuring of its terms), preferably in the strategic direction desired. It sets as its goal the manipulation of the evolution of systemic changes, resulting from actions or threatened actions, which create circumstances that facilitate ones own logic and which are, in optimal conditions, self-regulating. This paper will first examine the continuing problems of bias caused by military organizational culture, accompanied by an addiction to the rigid application of reductionist epistemologies. It will then investigate how Systemic Operation Desig