Dr Simon Newman
Senior Lecturer in Law
University of Westminster, UK

[Note: Dr. Newman has been kind enough to share some working notes he made for the London’s Metropolitan Police Department. It’s an excellent example of how that framework can help stimulate insights and creativity, which to me is the real purpose of models — Chet]

1st Generation - a culture of Order, “Line of Battle” and the parade ground, e.g., Napoleonic war. 1st generation entities emphasise order at any cost. WW1 tactics ‘walking into machine guns’ was probably the last gasp of 1st gen culture on the battleground.

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From zenpundit:

On Monday February 4th, Chicago Boyz will be hosting a blogging roundtable on Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans P. Osinga. Slightly over ten years since his death, the influential strategist and iconoclastic USAF Colonel John Boyd remains a subject of controversy despite the fact that (or more likely, because) many of his ideas impacted and informed military “transformation”, Network-centric Operations and the theory of 4th Generation Warfare.

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The Marines think so. “Is Warfighting Enough?” by Chet Richards and Don Vandergriff is now available in the February 2008 edition of the Marine Corps Gazette.

[Available to members and subscribers only. If you’re eligible, join! If you’re not, subscribe! Click here for details.]

Fabius Maximus asked: In an ideal world, what should have happened during MC 2002 after General Paul van Riper took the exercise “out of the box”, outside its designed conceptual frame?

[Original post on Fabius Maximus’s blog is here.]

Comments by Ed Beakley, who runs the Project White Horse blog:

This is a really good question with implication for any aspect of decision making and preparation for conflict in this century, and I suggest one worth more in-depth thought.

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The Critical Incident Management Institute at Greenville (SC) Tech will host the first annual Adaptive Leadership Symposium on March 19, 2008. The focus of the symposium will be creating leaders (and therefore organizations) that can use the OODA loop model to survive crises and periods of rapid change.

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By Chuck Spinney

More than seven years after 9-11, it ought to be clear from (1) the senseless destruction of Iraq, (2) the deteriorating war in Afghanistan, and (3) the increasing potential for chaos in nuclear-armed Pakistan, that George II has gomered up the so-called war on terror (WOT).

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Two insiders of the “military reform movement” of the 1970s and ’80s have written what amounts to a tell-all: Who was in the movement, who supported it, and who claimed to support it but in the end betrayed it. The military reform movement, for those unfamiliar with the term, was a bi-partisan effort to try to get the Pentagon to buy weapon systems that worked, adopt doctrines that had proven to win, and create personnel and training programs to support the new doctrines, weapons, and tactics. All of these were opposed by the senior leadership of the Pentagon, with few exceptions, and after an initial wave of enthusiasm, by the key leaders of Congress.

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