Note #27. Avoiding Data-Driven Disasters: Tonkin 1964 and Taiwan 2022—
- November 12, 2022
- ICSL admin
- Security, Strategy
- No Comments
Gulf of Tonkin, 1964 On 4 August 1964, data-driven decisions in an uncertain operational environment falsely assumed a North Vietnamese patrol boat attack on American destroyers in Gulf of Tonkin international waters. See Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s “The Fog of War” video account here, which mentions uncertainties such as weather, equipment limitations, and operator…
Paper #51. We Need to Expand Our Strategy Language to Compete and Wage Warfare in the Age of AI
- June 30, 2022
- ICSL admin
- Asia-Pacific, Leadership, Strategy
- No Comments
We need to rearrange our legacy language of coercion theory to compete in the contemporary information environment.
Paper #41. Concepts of Influence: Critical to Strategy and Human Control of Artificial Intelligence
- May 31, 2021
- Thomas A. Drohan, Ph.D., Brig Gen USAF ret.
- Cyber, Leadership, Strategy
- No Comments
Strategy for dynamic end-states must be multi-dimensional to be competitive in the information environment (ICSL Note #22). If operations are not informing and influencing, they become existential rather than instrumental. They justify themselves, which makes for poor strategy. Yet strategy is the competition that matters most for relevant operations. As we consider the three basic…
Paper #39. Information Intelligence & Assessment for All-Effects Warfare: A Competition that Subsumes Combined Arms & Deterrence
- May 6, 2021
- Thomas A. Drohan, Ph.D., Brig Gen USAF ret.
- Leadership, Security, Strategy
- No Comments
Our previous paper offered an assessable definition of “information“ to address two persistent problems in US security strategy: (1) the mismatch between narrow military doctrine and its broad effects; and (2) a “competition continuum“ below armed conflict. Why does this matter? The Information Environment is expansive, accessible and dynamic, characteristics that enable competitors to exploit…
Paper #21. Informatizing Operations: The Other Half of All-Domain Warfare
- March 23, 2020
- Michael D. Phillips, Col USAF ret. & Thomas A. Drohan, Brig Gen USAF ret.
- Cyber, Leadership, Strategy
- No Comments
Warfare has become all-domain, all-effects, and all-information. This reality is thriving in a comfort zone outside our entrenched concept of a “threshold of armed conflict.”
Paper #12. Time to Recreate Effective Competitive Advantage: Strategy, Technology and Information
- October 29, 2019
- Thomas A. Drohan, Ph.D., Brig Gen USAF ret.
- Commercial, Leadership, Strategy
- No Comments
In 1983, Project Socrates began as a Reagan initiative to develop technology-driven competitive advantage. Then it ended.
Paper # 9. The Primacy of Information Intelligence: Operational-to-Strategic Advantage
- September 17, 2019
- Thomas A. Drohan, Ph.D., Brig Gen USAF ret.
- Commercial, Cyber, Strategy
- No Comments
The question of what and whom to trust applies to all situations because uncertainty is pervasive. In the information environment (IE), the overriding context of trust is that it’s contested. Actors fight for the kind of information and people they need to compete and prevail. Four types of competition become apparent when we consider four contested purposes of strategic and anticipatory analysis: