Developing Naval Guileists

In the Aeneid, Virgil describes the contentious arguments between Achilles and Odysseus on whether the Greeks should adopt a strategy of force or one of guile to defeat their antagonists in the city of Troy. Odysseus eventually wins, with the famous Trojan Horse ultimately successful in this epic battle. Similarly, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan rejects the advice of his advisors and opts to deceive Eve rather than face God in a battle of force. The philosophical debate of guile versus force has faced us since the beginning of humanity and remains relevant today.

China too seems to be preparing for modern conflict, as indicated in their recently announced defense reorganization. One significant change is the creation of the Strategic Support Forces (SSF).

…the SSF will consist of three independent branches: ‘cyber force’ with ‘hacker troops’ responsible for cyber offense and defense; ‘space force’ tasked with surveillance and satellites; and ‘electronic force’ responsible for denial, deception, disruption of enemy radars and communications systems. The SSF integrates the previous PLA General Staff Headquarters Third and Fourth Departments, responsible for technical reconnaissance, electronic warfare, cyber intelligence and cyber warfare, as well as absorbing the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the former PLA General Political Department, tasked with information operations, propaganda and psychological warfare.

Developing artful naval “guileists” to counter future threats will take deliberate effort and will certainly make many traditionalists in the ranks today, often incentivized to maintain the status quo, very uncomfortable. Yet these are the types of people we need to confront opponents who mix electronic, cyber, intelligence and psychological warfare. Four recommendations to achieve a more cunning naval force follow.

Unleash our thinkers: Bold, cunning thinkers cannot be limited to our special operations community and the clandestine service. We need to develop a generation of leaders who can follow a script when required but who can also apply ingenuity to tactical problems when the operational situation necessitates and that will not occur by happenstance.

Now that the mind-numbing debate on full gender integration has ended, we need to make this new reality an operational advantage. At the heart of the gender integration debate was the controversial Marine Corps Study. While opponents of gender integration pointed to the results of physical tasks, they ignored that mixed gender units scored higher on cognitive tasks than did all-male units. We are doing our enemies a great service if we continue to measure the value our Sailors and Marines, male or female, based on their ability to carry a box of rocks, or similar tasks equally well-suited for a donkey, rather than creative guile.

We need to prepare all leaders, female and male, who are sly and cunningly intelligent by nature, for a greater role in military planning, not simply being familiar with the mechanics of the planning process but actually crafting ingenious solutions. To do this, we need to create an environment where men and women are comfortable challenging industrial-age paradigms of warfare.

In addition, however, female officers must take advantage of increasing opportunities and must not hesitate to challenge traditional schools of thought and create new ones, when appropriate. If women bring different or better skills to the fight, they have the obligation to put them into practice, this is more important than simply trying to fit in. For example, female voices have been conspicuously absent from the recent discourse on military reform, defense innovation, and naval strategy.

As context, it has been my personal observation that non-white male officers tend to stay within the established “box,” because they continually have to prove themselves to be fully qualified. Their counterparts more freely operate “outside the box” because they are often assumed to be fully qualified. This dynamic will only change with greater heterogeneity in our leadership corps. And it is incumbent on our senior leaders to encourage all subordinates with good ideas to let them loose.

Create complex problem solvers: The current military education and training systems create excellent linear thinkers. Unfortunately, the problems they will confront on a complex and uncertain battlefield will be wicked problems that they are ill-prepared to solve.

Wicked problems are unique, complex ones which are often poorly defined and interconnected to other thorny problems. Using a linear approach to solve them often creates additional challenges or significant unanticipated consequences. While creating artful, cunning options is part of the solution, these actions must be placed in their proper context and the entire set of interconnected relationships must be examined before execution. Military officers must develop increased sensing and awareness to ensure an effective feedback loop is created.

Design thinking offers great potential to enable our military officers to adapt in a complex environment. This structured approach, widely used in today’s most agile civilian companies, should be added to our current training systems and fully integrated into the military planning process.

Purge the risk averse: Making cunning military decisions requires a heightened level of risk-taking. Today, we tend to promote our most risk-averse officers. Following established practices, making no waves, being overly deferential to rank, and adhering to conventional schools of thought are safe ways to advance careers in today’s military. This unfortunate reality will have disastrous results in the future.

DoD’s Force of the Future and other personnel reform initiatives in the Pentagon focus on managing actual talent and deemphasize simply hitting career milestones. To support these essential reforms, the military services must also overhaul their approach to assessing performance and eliminate the single top-down, subjective reporting of officer fitness. Leaders must reward subordinates who succeed by getting outside of the pattern.

Part of assessment reform must address an officer’s ability to understand and manage risk, and comfort with assuming it when appropriate. While sometimes operationally needed, many officers are risk averse simply to protect their careers or to keep their boss out of trouble, even when that boss may not share the sentiment. Being overly cautious is as dangerous as being reckless on the future battlefield and we need to purge the risk averse from operational leadership positions.

Defeat hubris: Around the Pentagon and within the operating forces, bombastic proclamations such as “fighting at a time and place of our choosing” or “using overwhelming firepower to achieve victory” are often heard. While useful for motivating (or perhaps deceiving) ourselves, in reality the United States no longer has this luxury. Our challengers fight us globally, and don’t count our divisions, air wings or aircraft carriers. Further, we believe our own questionable analytical models, used to support investment decisions and to defend outdated weapon systems, while overlooking the reality of our military performance over the past several decades.

To overcome this condition, a variety of tools should be used across all levels of the organization. Wargaming, red-teaming, simulations, and other forms of thought experiments will develop creative thinking skills while grounding military planning in reality. Unlike the Marine Corps, where officers are taught to conduct tactical decision games and to put themselves in the “enemy’s shoes” as second lieutenants, the Navy seems to reserve participation in these intellectually challenging environments for elite senior officers.

Finally, leaders would benefit from adopting the mind-set of the underdog, placing themselves in scenarios where they have limited critical resources or a numerical disadvantage. In reality, there are many scenarios in which these two conditions occur. Such circumstances are often ignored. To be successful as the underdog in any form of competition requires a different way of thinking than we observe from our military officers today.

Much has been made recently about the need to create naval strategists. But strategy devoid of guile or one relying primarily on brute military force to achieve political objectives will fail. We must create naval “guileists” who inject bold thinking and cunning ideas into the traditional ends, ways and means approach to strategy development, operational planning and tactical execution. With these we will be successful in the future.

This article originally appeared at the U.S. Naval Institute Blog.