Breaking out of Reverse-Engineered Planning for Future Complex Security Challenges

This post is a revisit to a strategic design article published back in 2015 in the British military journal Defence Studies (Routledge, 15:4, 2015). In the original article, I present how militaries and security-oriented organizations approach complexity through a systematic, linear-casual logic where we end up reverse-engineering all of our activities as if we might control and predict what cannot ever be. Below, I paste select excerpts from that article that readers might pair to the many discussions and reflections on the last 8 months of chaos, collapse, and confusion in Afghanistan as well as other unexpected (and poorly predicted) events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ‘Great Power Competition’ and more. Our defense institutions appear frustrated and trapped clinging to outdated or irrelevant conceptual frames for making sense of complex security contexts… and are still often unwilling (or unwittingly preconditioned) to consider ideas from beyond the pale. Are we still stuck in this grand illusion that with just enough data, technological advantage and faster processing speeds, we can ‘win’ or defer/defend through oversimplified formulas and checklists?

Note: due to drawing from multiple sources formatted in different notation settings as well as how Medium organizes pasted citations, the numbering repeats in a 1,2,3…1,2,3 or the citation is referenced incomplete in APA. The original source documents have the correct citations for those interested.