Sea Control - Sea Control 577: Reconceptualizing War with Ben Zweibelson

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Links1. Reconceptualizing War, by Ben Zweibelson, Helion & Company, 2025.2. Understanding the Military Design Movement, by Ben Zweibelson, Routledge, 2024.3. Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew, by Ben Zweibelson, Air University Press, 2023.4. War Becoming Phantasmal: A Cognitive Shift in Organized Violence beyond Traditional Limits, by Ben Zweibelson, Marine Corps University Press, May 2024.5. "Breaking the Newtonian Fetish," by Ben Zweibelson, Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Vol. 15. No. 1.

You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome aboard, Sea Control fans. This is Jay. My guest today is Dr. Ben Zweibelson. Ben's the author of numerous books and articles, and he's got a forthcoming book out later this spring called Reconceptualizing War. As a reminder, as always, his views and mine are his own and no reflect any official position or stance of the DOD, the U.S. government, or any other entity we may be associated with. And also, today, we're just going to touch on some of Ben's writings in the time we have. Although he's a retired Army officer and current Space Command civilian, much of his research has applicability to naval operations and the maritime domain. I just want listeners to go from here and dig deeper into his work. also just want to add a little caveat maybe even a trigger warning for some of our listeners if

you're a doctrine or jpme fundamentalist type if you like your concepts about warfare and war fighting to fit on bumper stickers and be easily digestible then some of what ben's going to talk about may be a little distressing might cause some cognitive dissidence some heartburn but i want the listeners to stay with me keep an open mind practice some of that critical thinking we're always talking about and and have fun i think this will be a great conversation so ben after all that Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in your current fields of research? Well, thanks, Jay.

Thanks again for having me as well. I guess a short story on me is I was an art major all the way through high school and into college, and I never thought I would join the military. Then I realized how expensive college was, joined the National Guard. Next thing you know, I'm doing 22 years Army infantry, went from enlisted to officer. And along the way, I went to a really cool school called the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS. And it was at this school where I kind of had my eyes opened to these very, very different things that prior to that, I was always questioning doctrine, I was always questioning the way we did things,

but I didn't have a real good understanding of the theory. And that school really opened up everything that led to me getting my doctorate, studying strategy, looking at different ways of how we go about understanding war itself. So that brings us to today and this book, Reconceptualizing War. It's really an homage, if you will. The very first assignment they had at the SAMS program when I went there was define your war theory or your war philosophy. And I think everybody's is just terrible. You know, we just kind of pull from doctrine. And so this book is really that late assignment, if you will.

Nice. Yeah, it's an ambitious title there. I'm going to go back a little as we build up to sort of this. Some of your other writing, or a lot of it, deals with the military design and just the design movement, design processes, as I've seen it. Particularly your book, Beyond the Pale. Could you tell our listeners, what is military design and the military design movement as you define it? Sure. And then for anyone that's interested, the book Beyond the Pale, because it's a DOD book, it's not copywritten. I make no profit off of that book. The Air University Press has a free PDF download. And depending on their funding each year, you can contact them and they'll send you for free a free copy. Fantastic. We will put a link to that in the show notes too. That's cool. Fantastic. Yeah. So Beyond the Pale is, but my first book was actually my dissertation or a version of it that I, you know, when you convert it. So my PhD dissertation was on the military design movement. So that first book through Rutledge, which is available on paperback now, is called Understanding the Military Design Movement.

So for your listeners that have heard the word design thrown around, it's usually tangled up with planning, with operational art, with operational design and campaigning and all these things. And people are like, wait a minute, what the heck is this thing called design? Right. So here's the real quick down and dirty. There's there's two categories of design. And I talk about this in this new book, Reconceptualizing War. So design means you're giving the organization that which it needs, but not necessarily what it wants. So when we go about following processes and doctrines and establish things, that's planning and planning. I'm not I'm a recovering planner myself. I still do a lot of planning in my day job.

And so when you're doing planning, you're doing what the organization wants you to do in the way that it wants it. Right. So if you go to a restaurant, you order your favorite meal, that's akin to planning, right? Now, for those listeners that have children or have difficult siblings, and you try to get them to try some new food, you know how it happens to every parent. You're like, just try it. You'll love it. You'll love it. And they're like, no, no, no. And then the kid tries it.

And my middle son, we were in France when we were stationed in Germany, and he tried escargot, and he loved it. And so his brothers refused to eat snails. This kid guzzles them down. It's hilarious. Now, that's really what design does for the military is it's disruptive. It's innovative in that it breaks from the established norms and brings in new experimental frameworks that generally do things that rubs the organization the wrong way because it's not reinforcing the planning. Now, you have to do planning in the end, but you can use design to create new planning that you otherwise could never have done. And that's what design really does for organizations if they manage and oscillate between doing enough design so that their planners can then go forth and provide the organization with new opportunities that get them to their objectives better. And those objectives actually might be totally different than the ones they started off with. And this frustrates an organization that's fixated largely on ends-ways-means, reverse-engineer planning, and these constructs that before we cross the line of departure, we want to have everything kind of stabilized so we can freeze the system and then slice into it and get what we want and then start the whole system up again. And we actually even illustrate this in our doctrine.

And that's just not the way complexity is or complex systems. So the way that we do things tends to run against. So the way that we plan doesn't really help us when we need something innovative, and that's what the design movement does. However, the military design movement struggles because it has quite a bit of a couple of identity crises. processes one camp uh is very much into trying to appease the institution and do things in a doctrinal sort of way and that's the type of design you'll find in military doctrine including the navy's own design process which many don't know but it's in your 350 page doctrinal publication it's it's annex d for design right and i asked the naval war college professors about this a couple years ago when i was researching my book and a bunch of them were

like we didn't even know that was there it's called uh i think it's called operational design or or the navy operational design and that's a good example where there's too much appeasement it's it's made by planners for planners and it doesn't really do anything out of the box you're just repackaging and repainting things but the other camp is the one i i probably belong to more which is they are the heretics and the disruptors and the naysayers and the destroyers And so if you follow this route and you're in uniform, just be very careful because you could very quickly be out of uniform. Right. But that is the disruptive, dangerous, destructive type of design that organizations need when the things that they keep doing over and over don't work. So hopefully my rambling around that I kind of targeted or answered your question. Am I good, Jay?

Absolutely. Very, very good. Appreciate that. No, that's good. And again, as I was going to say, folks, it's I want to put the podcast together with you because I thought these are fascinating ideas. But there it is. There is complexity there. So everybody, you know, go to the show notes, read this stuff, too. There's there's a lot there. So we're just hitting the wavetops, as we like to say. And that with that, one of the things you argue and some of your writing particularly beyond the pale, as I've read, is a lot of the current military maxims concepts are really oversimplified. things that can't really be summed up in a sentence or two you talked about the uh modern military zeal to systematically reduce complex security challenges to a linear causal formulaic sequence promoting if yes go there if no go there um so with that we'll go into another uh something

i liked about your writings could you tell us what the newtonian fetish is and why you think it's a bad thing all right so there's a a huge amount of this new book explains um what our newtonian fetish is and i use the word fetish provocatively of course because you've got to be a little bit provocative in in today's social media environment otherwise no one's going to really pay attention to you but but with that it's it's it's not being flippant in a way that there is nothing there um there's in fact quite a bit so i i explain the military history i explain the science and i explain what christopher paperone calls how the military does pseudo science in almost all of our doctrines so this is where we we firmly demand for example that

there are centers of gravity uh right and that sounds very scientific right until you actually start teasing it apart and and you look at and you say all right well let's take a bunch of astrophysicists right let's take neil degrice tyson and a bunch of his peers and they're going to draw on the on the whiteboard uh formulas on how scientists understand the sun um the center of gravity cis lunar space how the earth has spin three body problem and there's beautiful math there and it shows it and then you can go out and measure it and quantifiably show that centers of gravity for gravitational large objects and celestial mechanics it's a real thing it's it's no kidding real and if you screw it up you're gonna you're gonna crash your rockets right

now where do why is the military using centers of gravity because if you ask these same physicists hey take a look at our military doctrine they're gonna look at it and go that's not center of gravity that's not it at all it's you just took the metaphor and that's true because when we go back in time to the mid-19th century we can talk about clausus we can talk about jomini we can talk about um scharnhorst and and clausus's peers because center of gravity He actually wasn't Karl von Clausewitz. He made it most famous, but he didn't actually create it. These concepts were being generated in the German Prussian schoolhouses as they were

trying to professionalize their military and pull themselves out of a feudal period that had long gripped most all of Europe until Napoleon stepped onto the stage and just kind of shattered the whole system and also made the requirement of, hey, if you're going to be a professional if you're going to want if you want to win uh you better know what you're doing you better be trained you better understand it you can't just show up with your nobility and say yes i'm in charge all right so but the problem with that was that in the race to professionalize our military uh took on a newtonian construct and and this is what is called the functionalist Paradigm and Social Paradigm Theory, which is what my new book is about. And it explains

Burrell and Morgan and social paradigms. And let me return to the term paradigm, because I know a lot of viewers are familiar with Thomas Kuhn and scientific paradigms. And in fact, I would say 90, if not 99.999% of the time, when you hear the military talk about paradigms, they're really confusing and conflating Kuhn's original scientific paradigms with what we need to use in war, which is a slightly later adaptation by sociologists, and that's where Burrell and Morgan came in in the 1970s, and they created social paradigm theory. But let's return to that in a second. Back to Newtonianism. In the essentially age of European Enlightenment, which predates Clausewitz and Domini, you're in the Machiavellian period,

and you have this huge return to earlier Greek and Roman constructs. That's what the Renaissance was. But it was coupled with a new way of looking, this age of Enlightenment, this new way of looking at things scientifically. And so the hard scientists developed first. So, you know, you've got geology, you've got physics, you've got chemistry, you've got biology a little bit later. and so then the military said hey hey hey we need to get professionalized uh we need a schoolhouse they already got history they've had mathematics forever but then you had to separate things that were stuck to the sciences such as kings and lords and emperors for thousands of years would have their mathematician show up in the royal court with the royal astrologist right this is

a real way that we declared how we decided war strategies for multiple empires it was wait a Now, the mathematician was right because he was saying, look, Mars is at this position in the sky, and that's going to move to this position by this date, which means you should invade then. Because then the core astrologist says, well, Mars, the god of war, favors you when you do this, this, and that. That was pseudoscience. Actually, that was not scientific at all. But those two things were tied together at the hip, indistinguishable for thousands of years, and how militaries went to war and how leaders decided how warfare would occur, right? The Age of Enlightenment changed that because it stripped away the things that were not scientific so that they could focus on things that arguably were or were drawn from scientific disciplines. Hence, centers of gravity, levels of war, principles of war.

mass, speed, maneuver. All these things come from either physics or chemistry. Levels of war arguably come from geology. It was very popular in the 18th and 19th century to use the metaphor of layers, because prior to the discovery in geology of different geological layers, they just didn't know how the earth worked. And so guess what? Layers got grabbed by everybody, including sigmund freud ego super ego id right so we have strategic operational tactical now we've had stragos or strategy and tactics going all the way back to ancient greek times ancient chinese times but we didn't arrange it in layers in a relational hierarchy as we do because that's newtonian everything that we did in the 18th and 19th centuries was newtonian inspired to make the

military like a science. And then later in the 20th century, when things didn't work in World War I, in the application of either Jomini or Clausewitz, depending on where you look at it, you had reformists in the interwar period, such as Little Hart, such as F.C. Fuller. Fuller himself wrote a book saying, this is how we're going to make militaries scientific. And he was what's called a positivist which is where the social world including war equals the natural world which means you can take directly from biology directly from physics directly from chemistry and apply it to war and that's the newtonian fetish nice all right thank you and again i'll keep reminding you i will we will put links to about all these articles many of them are open

source so folks can get more of it but that's a fantastic along those same lines is that the newtonian fetish we'll go back a little pre-newtonian um if you go over your concept about phantasmal war which i also found fascinating so all right well hit the folks with that real quick yeah all right very quickly and this is a relatively take your time this this came out last year and uh i love i have great relationship with the different services and their publishing branches in particular i gotta say that the marine corps university press i'm gonna give them a shout out. They are way ahead of most of the rest of the services in terms of really pushing for a combination of things that are more conventional, more comfortable with the

organization. But then they put in quite a bit of controversial, challenging, experimental constructs, which I'm not going to name a particular service, but one that I've worked with for years. They are absolutely against anything that violates doctrine or violates what's taught at your war college or violates what's taught at your majors course they don't want to publish it because the editors think like doctrinal uh gatekeepers and that's unfortunate it's a cultural problem in in several services but i got to give the marine corps a lot of a lot of credit phantasmal war is one of my articles uh through them that was a little recently and What I argued was that in this pre-modern period before science, you had that combination of the court astrologer having the same parity, the same influence as the court mathematician, and that would directly influence how war was waged.

For instance, if we go back to the Peloponnesian Wars, we go back to ancient Greece, you'll be familiar with the oracle, right? Oracles. Sure. And people would senior leaders would consult the oracles and they would they would then make major decisions whether or not to invade, whether or not to enact trade, whether or not to go on, you know, all these different massive things. Well, when we peel that back historically and look at what the oracles really were, they were all mostly teenage illiterate girls high on drugs that were being fed to them. No, seriously, look it up. Wikipedia that. And so they were high on drugs in these temples, and they didn't really know what they were doing. They were just babbling and having acid trips. But they were being handled by their gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers were the one that would take bribes.

so line this up somebody wants to go to war somebody wants to be a war profiteer or make or get some land or get whatever they go and they give enough money to the oracle handler and guess what the oracle is going to babble whatever you want and so in this and then not only the oracles but there's quite a bit of supernatural and this is where in the pre-modern period yes there was a king or yes there was a senior religious leader like a pope and yes they could control a military instrument of power in their kingdom to go and invade another right and and however there was quite a bit of a supernatural or phantasmal element in the pre-modern world it was how war was justified that we were all pieces on the chessboard sure but there was a divine hand

controlling all of it and therefore if you lost your battle well you go back to your kingdom and say well it was god's will you know and you know this is a little bit of a fatalist uh construct which i don't want people to kind of dismiss it right away this was how most all the pre-modern world really looked at war itself i mean the civil war if you get the same sort of thing going on there going it's god's great game certain certain confederate leaders particularly so yeah you have to go this is a thread that occurs throughout um history now this american civil war is an interesting one because there's a lot of arguments that was the first modern war but i don't want to dive down that rabbit hole just yet the um the phantasmal article about how the pre-modern

construct was basically dismantled you know we removed the core astrologer and we inserted instead a military advisor who was trained in a machiavellian or a baconian or a Clausewitzian or a Geminian sense. They had theory. They had some sort of doctrine. They had history. They had experiences that they could then scientifically look at. And if you were a Geminian, you would argue that the combination of principles of war, if you were Clausewitzian, you were combining the Enlightenment thinking with German idealism and German romanticism, which was available for the Prussians. And it drove a lot of their newer constructs that klauswitz was a pioneer on so so i'm definitely not poo-pooing klauswitz and i'm not looking him

in unfairly with jominy now um this period though this modern period is what we're in now and this is where we as the human control the chessboard what phantasmal may become in the near future uh is with the extension of technology and artificial intelligence and this goes into the second part and the third part of the article where if you have if you reach general artificial intelligence and we're already having issues with narrow intelligence which narrow intelligence for ai means it could do um limited things better than you or me and this has been around forever your uh your wrist uh wristwatch calculator could beat you at math uh back in the 1960s and 70s right? But today, you can't beat technology. And we saw this with Jeopardy, where Deep Blue and

IBM defeated the best Jeopardy champions. That's narrow AI. And the way to remember the difference for our viewers is narrow AI is fragile. If Alex Trebek in the middle of that game had said, hey everyone let's spice it up i'm gonna make three daily doubles and you also get a steal if you get uh three questions in the row uh correct you get to steal three hundred dollars from whichever opponent you want the humans that are playing would quickly adapt and come up with new strategies deep blue would have to shut down programmers would have to come on stage it would look like the scene from uh robocop where ed 209 is between gun and that freaking poor guy right they'd be ripping cords out

that's narrow ai it can't do that now once we hit general ai agi yes it can and not only can it it'll still beat all the humans it'll beat the pants off of them in everything that's valuable that human beings do poetry music uh strategy uh physics uh you name it they're going to beat you at it right what happens when something is five six seven times more intelligent than the smartest human we lose track of we lose scale so we we can we can deal with if you think about this way if you had a prisoner and a military prisoner and it was albert einstein or someone with einstein's intelligence or newton's intelligence you know they're thinking it's around 190 100 maybe 200 like you right that's pretty darn smart yeah so if you had einstein you'd probably treat him like

hannibal lecter you'd lock him up and gag him and not let him talk because you're like this guy's so smart we got to be careful he's going to get the guards he's going to he's going to screw with minds right they even had that in uh science of the lambs or hannibal lecter i think in the book he made the one of the other guys he convinced him to kill himself or swallow his own tongue but but moving down through that path what happens if you have an ai system that's three times smarter than einstein and then it becomes eight times smarter but hides it from you and then it's 16 times smarter and now it's 32 times smarter we won't know what to do and this is where phantasmal comes in again because instead of us believing in the supernatural we have something that's

operating in a higher plane of cognition and what i mean by that is if you've got a dog your dog loves you if you're a good owner even if you're a bad owner my dog but when you leave for work when you get in your car and drive away your dog doesn't know where you're going doesn't know doesn't understand it's not on its cognitive plane it just knows it misses you and you're gone and if you come home after five minutes because you just ran down to get something at the gas station or you come home eight hours later your dog is just as happy because it doesn't cognitively think um at that plane of existence that we do and that we take for granted right ai at another cognitive plane which doesn't exist yet but we're we're cautiously creeping towards

there at actually kind of a scary pace if you if those are my readers that are big into ai they're going to know about ai hallucinations yes is which is one thing but then now ai scheming is something very different and much more dark so ai scheming is something that non-agi is doing already wait till we're with agi wait till we're with that right it's going to be out of control and this brings in um allusions to skynet and all of our science fiction the borg i robot and etc and the problem with all those is that they're all stories where the plucky human protagonists win in the end because they're actually not matching wits with something eight times smarter than them all of our protagonists uh that are that are you know skynet are weak they're equal

to us and so there's always a weakness a center of gravity if you will and a critical vulnerability sorry uh and we strike at it and then the humans win the humans always can triumph right sure that is not how it will go down against agi it just won't and and there's um nick bostrom wrote a fantastic book for my uh for viewers that are interested in the ai please check out super intelligence because he talked about something called the treacherous turn and this is where ai could go from something that would be altruistic and helping and nurturing or in a weird way at the uh the the humans the fat humans in uh wall-e right remember they all were yeah they were like being fed to death and they were on these like hover chairs and they couldn't do anything because

the robots were just we're here to make you happy we're here to do it right and so right that's an altruistic agi now if you go the treacherous term which bostrom talks about this is your skynet and your board feature where they're going to eradicate us or or treat us like uh dogs or even worse maybe like ants yeah i know we've been talking a little bit off topic here but uh how not at all no what's this yeah no this is this is fantastic again to go back to we sort of introed with like we're gonna we're gonna hit the wave talks of a lot of interesting topics here so i'll encourage folks to dive down a little more it's it's good stuff um before we talk about more about your new book since we're these are all of course like big i guess uh fogo level concepts policy making

perhaps perhaps people who are listening might think it's it's along those lines but we got i know we got a lot of junior officers we even got some you know enlisted folks former enlisted folks like like me and you what um for these ideas for folks in the u.s military others um anything particular you would like them to take away from this stuff those who aren't necessarily policymakers but they're you know they're operating their their tip of the spear frontline sorts or you know washing dishes clean toilets on a ship whatever yeah i mean um so i remember when i was a private going through basic training this was in the early 90s at a you know sand hill and and and the thing is when you're young uh you you desperately want to be part of the

organization and you want to excel you want to be the best at converging and and that's what basic training really is about and it's and there's so much good on how converging constructs can uniformly reduce risk create uh repetitive effective behaviors and i like to think you know as an infantryman um if you gave us a a building to clear anywhere in the world uh and just using doctrine you know clearing stairwells clearing rooms uh four band stack these types of things hooligan tools you could do any room in any building anywhere in the world and as long as you've got enough intel on it you're good to go whether it's a mud hut in southern afghanistan in the horn of pangeway or it's charlie sheen's cocaine filled apartment in hollywood hills right

it doesn't matter you're just adapting to the context but the convergent processes still work right that's a big difference because if you're young or if you're just a junior rank or if you're at a tactical level you have to be careful when you're looking at things that are convergent that are that are good because you don't want to challenge and disrupt those things otherwise you're going to get yourself in in the front landing arrest position very quickly what you can do though is looking at the social and the how we look at understanding our social frames about the world for instance going back to basic training we had a lot of ideas and beliefs in the late 20th century when i went to basic training that aren't valid anymore some of those

had to do with gender some of those had to do with sexual orientation some of those had to do with um how to go about what war actually could accomplish at the tactical level for strategic aims right so there's a whole panoply of things that are out there and if you look at that you go all right well how do we educate contemporary uh drill sergeants and and and trainees or trainers if you will and what's the best way to structure basic training so we get the outputs that we need in a graduate versus a brand new person who's sitting on the on the bus with a shaved head and someone's screaming get off my bus right which we all we all went through that right yeah we know that guy some things never change but but the things that do need to change

this is where design is very useful in this type of thinking but you have to have an understanding of why we do things in the legacy system like why do we do a certain things a certain way what are some of the things that aren't working anymore why are they not working has society changed has the world changed has technology changed or if we just come to a different plateau if you will on what's required in war and then what are the options that are available and can we experiment on those to scale to find what are the right things and then can we prototype and do these changes and then can we measure the results and show hey this way of approaching say basic training uh or or doing tactical uh shooter drills is more effective right so

like for example just in my military career um we went from very static rifle ranges which was the bread and butter of the infantry to these incredible um fast paced your heart's beating like crazy and you and you got to run through different obstacles and you're doing all kinds of different magazine changes and weapon changes and malfunctions and you gotta drag a body like that stuff's great but guess what in the early 90s nobody was doing that it just wasn't really done and maybe in certain elite units but those are some good changes but it requires a design process nice thank you thank you very good i'll i'll uh point out to listeners we're recording this on january 19th 2025 since it may be a few weeks or months and so i was i was taken to this

sort of thing because we just entered the 34th anniversary of the beginning of the air war of desert storm which i was an extremely junior person around thinking about and just thinking about the things that changed there in the next few months and then that a few years and then definitely a few years later that's awesome yeah um lastly we'll hit up on um tell us more about reconceptualizing war is like a that's a very ambitious title for a thing you've touched on at some there but do you have a i know it's tough to get into elevator speeches on something like that but what uh what can what can readers of this book when it comes out here what can they expect well um so i i was on social media today and i saw that um the army um one of their social media

outlets had just um promoted a book on strategy and uh and it was something like the tagline of like you know every junior to senior leader who hasn't read this needs to read this because this will give you the firmest grounding in military strategy that's possible right and and initially or immediately i'm looking at this and i know the book and i and i've read the book and and here's the problem um that is one way of looking at strategy just one of many and the problem is that it discounts all the other ways as those aren't real or those are irrelevant or those are wrong or insert your derogatory comment that someone who's a proponent of this book and again i'm not attacking the book i'm attacking single paradigm thinking in conflict right because i

had uh i essentially had most of my career in the war on terror years so iraqi invasion iraqi surge then i deployed again for the afghan surge one and then i did whatever you call um the first Afghan retrograde under the Obama administration. So I had nothing but counterinsurgency for my over three years of deployments in war zones. And so what I was looking at that entire time, whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan, was I don't think, I think tactically they're exactly the same, right? When you're dealing with insurgency, counterinsurgency, you've got bullets, you've got bombs, you've got IEDs, you've got kinetic things. Yes, I'm not questioning that. What I am questioning is how we look at war itself and how we understand

the social constructs that different populations involved in conflicts and crises will look at, and that defines how they go about why they're fighting, why they're resisting, what they are doing. And when we, as a military, throw a book onto social media and we say, this is the way to understand strategy right so it's not it's not and it's it's it's intellectually dishonest right now a lot of that's unwitting but that's part of because our pme our professional military education is stuck in one paradigm and one paradigm only and this book attempts to explain okay it's not that you're right or wrong but here's your box right in this box uh burrell and morgan who who came up with the original social paradigm theory, they came up with four paradigms, right? And one's

called functionalism, and that's the biggest one. That is what we in the modern Western military believe. And this is grounded on positivism. I mentioned that earlier. That is believing the social world equates the natural world. There's an incremental development of knowledge through objectivity, reducing things down, such as PAMICI-PT, levels of war, lines of effort, principles of war. So these universal principles or laws that govern reality, whether you like it or not, all generals are bound by them, right? And the smart generals, Jominy will tell you, they understand how to use the principles correctly. And it's called Geminian hindsight, when he says, oh, you lost, you lost the battle? Well, it's because you didn't use my principles

correctly. Right? And that's a little bit intellectually dishonest, because that's one way of looking at war so burrell and morgan also came up with other social paradigms and that's what this book is about saying hey here's here's why we believe what doctrine is and what theory is and in our corner of the world and it's a very powerful one but here are some others and this is how they differ and i actually tease out um you know my ninth chapter is when i actually show the full graphic and this thing has got uh the islamic state boko haram al-qaeda the muslim brotherhood branch davidians hamas uh the iranians uh then i've got uh post-modernists such as the invisible committee the uh chinese assassination corps synonymous the hackers group anti-fascist

so and so forth but then we've got uh we we map them all out and explain what they are but let me return to one thing i mentioned earlier about paradigms right yeah so when you hear that magical word it's a very great word it's wonderful as our new president you know trump would say it's it's the best word it's wonderful there's no word better right so so paradigm is important because um coon thomas coon when he came up with this construct and he was drawing from earlier uh work in germany and uh and my book goes into those origins but in the 1960s he said look science advances not in this nice even evolutionary way it's it's a lot of busy work by non-innovative, non-heretical scientists working in that existing paradigm, which for

a long time was Newtonianism. And then Newton was displaced by Einstein, by relativity, by quantum. And the 20th century had major paradigm shifts at the very beginning with these new theories that kind of upset the entire apple cart. And we still use Newtonian physics metaphorically to help us get by life because when you're driving a car newtonian physics is really good right you don't think about right like you don't think about einstein's theory of relativity when you're right but they do think about it when for example we're all excited about elon musk and mars well guess what you've got to use quantum you've got to use relativity if you've got a colony that's going to mars is on mars you can't avoid it uh it's it's it's not a

huge difference in time space and these types of things but it's there and it's absolutely critical and these things are difficult for us to deal with so a scientific paradigm shift that thomas coon's talking about is where science is using a framework and that framework good enough until it's not and then these heretics these radicals these innovators say you know what this whole thing doesn't work i'm gonna come up with something totally different that replaces it And if they can prove it works, as Einstein did, it replaces the existing scientific paradigm completely. It's a one-for-one swap. Now, that's scientific paradigm.

What we were talking about here in war, you do not use scientific paradigms unless you're talking about technology. So, yes, we no longer use horse cavalry charges. Fully agree. Absolutely. However, a social paradigm is different. And so Burrell and Morgan in the 1970s said, look, scientific paradigms are great, but we need to apply this to sociology. And the thing is that a social paradigm doesn't replace another because it's superior. Social paradigms are generated in modern society because different groups have different deeply held philosophical beliefs about what the world is, why we're here, what our purposes are. and these create the the framework for belief systems for culture for societies for for civilization and how they go about doing things and this is how we differ on economics this is

how we differ on on the belief of religion or government or gender all these different things and it's also how we differ about what war is why war exists and how we use war so this is very heavy philosophical stuff but you go back into iraq and afghanistan right and you look at the taliban or you look at al-qaeda or you look at the islamic the islamic state right or if you look at protests that are stateside at a university that are anti-war well who's protesting and why are they protesting and how are they protesting and what are they really trying to do there's a lot of different things that are going on that one paradigm alone won't answer sure burrell and morgan's construct and social paradigm is that once a social paradigm is is used by practitioners

they don't want you to think about others and so they deny the existence of others and they basically say you need to use our box for you to understand and don't you dare think outside the box right which is part of what beyond the pale was getting at but this book really explains it so i start off with i've got uh two chapters chapters three and four that are just on functionalism which that's where you're going to find klauswitz that's where you're going to find Germany, that's where you're going to find Machiavelli, Vauban, Boulot, all these different great Western European thinkers that have helped us with defining what modern war is. But they're boxed in into this framework, this functionalist paradigm,

what's beyond those boxes. And that's what my book gets into and explains, essentially, war the 20th and 21st century and how we expanded out after world war one and world war one is very important on social paradigm theory because it changed almost everything that war changed so many things but we can dive into that a little bit um so was that a was that a good segue into the book that's a that's a fantastic segue yeah i think so i think so i'm excited i've got to read little snippets of it that you posted some stuff online along the way there so but i look forward to seeing the full uh whole thing come out and although i said there there isn't you i think you're resistant to little short snippets of dogma kind of thing the graphics in there you do have

some really great graphs that you can or uh you know various uh like you you were explaining other sort of sort of target you can look at a single page in some of this um and and a lot of the concepts come to come to mind i think if you're into imagery so i got a lot out of that so anyway highly highly recommended to folks there um and and the rest of your writing too i'll also So we'll put links to where they can get that book and to your open source stuff and to your Rutledge stuff. And then I'll shout out to Marine Corps University Press, too, because I've worked with those guys a few times. Those gals, I should say, really great. Angela and the folks there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good, good group there. And I like what they're putting out.

Anything. I know you're you're pretty heavily online. Any any place you want to tell folks to follow you there? LinkedIn, the Twitter? Yeah. So if you're if you're on the X platform, formerly on Twitter, I'm on there quite a bit. And I often share and post comments and put up article links and whatnot. I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit, even though that's starting to get heavily abused by a lot of people that turn it into Facebook. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I've got personal accounts that I don't use those social media platforms. And, you know, I've got Google Scholar and some other stuff. But, yeah, LinkedIn and X are the two areas where I can interact and, you know, engage with people.

And I try to, I really try to post academic stuff, things that deal with our profession and thinking about war in different ways. And a lot of it does get into the academic areas. But, again, this goes back to when I was a private, there was a lot of do as you're told or do it because I said so or do it because it's written down, right? You're not good to think. Exactly, exactly. And the problem with that is that, look, like we don't want people at all levels of the organization challenging and disrupting in a negative way. Of course, there will be anarchy, and that goes against what we're trying to do. But at every level, at every level, you absolutely need to encourage creative, innovative, critical thinking, particularly with your young people, because when you're bringing in a whole bunch of E1s, when you're bringing in a whole bunch of PFCs, when you're bringing in a bunch of cadets or even second lieutenants, right, they're looking at the world with a fresh set of eyes and they lack all that institutional experience.

And we look at that one dimensionally. We say, oh, you got to keep that lieutenant away. I don't want to make any decisions. Oh, boy. Get the platoon sergeant. Right. And part of that is true. Part of that's very true. Right. But the other part is absolutely dead wrong, because when you have a new person who's brand new to your organization, they have none of the filters and biases that are saturated through the rest of us. Those of us have been in for a very long time. There's certain things we're corrupted in that we just we don't want to change it. right? No matter what, because that's the way it was and that's the way it's going to be. And that's exactly what gets us to military defeat. Not always. There's a lot of things

that get us there. But one of the things we don't like to say is, you know what? It was a lack of creativity and innovation. And the greatest example of this in recent times is the 9-11 Commission Report, right? I mean, that came out. Tons and tons of research and work. They're trying to figure out what happened. How did we get so blindsided? And, you know, I don't know if you know, the number one conclusion of that report was a lack of imagination. wow yeah lack of imagination and and that um is terrible because when we think about that we go okay well if we have a lack of imagination what could we do to fix that how could we fix that in how we develop people well guess what the answer is you can't just change it at the war college level you're too late and if you're changing it at the field grade level guess what you're still

too late you've got to start from day one of being of get off my bus right right you got to start at day one with the right amount of innovative creative thinking that's instilled in a productive way it'll probably be just 10 of your basic training or 10 of your basic officer school but it then needs to be 20 of your first non-commissioned officers course and 20 of your captain's course and it should be 50 to 60 percent at your war college level if not higher but we don't do that we don't do that at all nice nice well that's that's it i don't know where else to go from there except let's keep digging into the book because that's that's fantastic um i wish we had i wish we keep going on this for a few hours but again i'll just refer people to

your writing. Dr. Zweibelson, thanks so much for being with us today. This was fantastic. Jay, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It was great. Again, folks, look down below here in the show notes and read some of Ben's stuff. And with that, we will talk to you all next time. Seacontrol out. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon