Following hot on the heals of Fukuyama’s piece, Robert Kaplan addresses the current state of America’s foreign policy and the Pentagon’s new Quadrennial Defense Review in the New York Times with Send in the State Department.

Kaplan focuses on and encourages the use of small units opertaing semi-autonomously in strife torn areas.

Take the Horn of Africa, a low-profile theater where small American military teams comb a large region and engage in military training and civil affairs projects with local forces as a way to build relationships in advance of a major crisis. Never again should we be in the situation that we were in on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where there were no intelligence assets on 9/11 because we had closed all our networks the decade before, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Kaplan goes on to urge the involvement of the State Department in these missions. This suggests that we need to not only equip military units to operate with force, but to be able to initiate if not state-building, then village-building projects that go beyond picking up garbage or short-term humanitarian relief. Perhaps units will be equipped with city planners or with political scientists who can begin to work with local residents to initiate new institutions. In his article The Mayor of Ar Rutbah in Foreign Policy last November, James Gavrilis suggests the need for such a change. An Army Special Forces officer, Gavrilis had first hand experience with insitution and city-building as his group moved through Iraq. As his unit passed through the town of Ar Rutbah, they stopped and attempted to help the local population implement civil institutions. He writes:

Because we didn’t receive any guidance for governance or reconstruction, and certainly not for spreading democracy, I had to make up everything as I went, based on the situation on the ground and what I remembered from my Special Forces training and a handful of political science classes. I entered the city with only our strategic objective for Iraq in mind: to establish a free, democratic, and peaceful Iraq without weapons of mass destruction. And that is what I tried to achieve in my own microcosm of the war.

In his book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda suggests that war has seen a constant evolution based on changes in tactics and technology. He sees military operations set up as machines that run, consuming resources. He tracks the evolution of organization within military efforts, from the swarming machines of barbarian raiders to the supply-side machines of Napolean’s army. Often these changes are predicated on a shifts in technology. For example, the accuracy of the conical bullet provides a technological tipping point for military organization, allowing military organization to shift from large lines of rifle volleys to smaller, more independent units.

The implementation of smaller units that operate not only militarily, but also diplomatically suggests a further evolution of the military machine. The military evolves from not only destructive to constructive work. In DeLanda’s book he raises the ire of actual robots powered by artificial intelligence conducting military operations. Obviously, we have already reached this state of affairs with smart bombs. But each unit as a machine of combat and construction is far more intriguing. In this situation you have the destructive force laying the ground work for re-construction. Focus on re-constrution would seem to be a good development. One of the glaring missteps in the Bush Admininstration’s plan for Iraq was simply wiping away instituions without replacing them. The quagmire in Iraq illustrates the clear need for quick and constant attention to immediate building of civil institutions. As the army and special forces are especially equipped to be deployed quickly and widely, they should carry construction as an implicit goal.

Each group of special forces would serve as a little repair cell, equipped with both military power, and repair power. The unit would take on the task of both military exercises and implementing governmental institutions. Rather than state building, they would be individual units of village-building. The super-structure of the army would connect these individual areas of repair back to the central nervous system of the state. In this way, the structure of the army would then provide the initial network of connecting civil institutions.

While I think the trend to more autonomous and complete units is good, it is not without problems. My biggest fear with this is we tend to build things in our own image. If the military is the organization laying down civil institutions, what sort of civil institutions do you get? In the development of the military machine does embodying both destructive and constructive force in one institution create a sort of perpetual state machine?

And while I’m at it, I’ll throw up this article from last Sunday’s Week in Review.  The article asks that most eternal (and possibly incosequential) question, “Can games be art?”  This has always seemed a bit of red herring to me.  Art is such a fuzzy term.  Are games products of creative endeavor?  Yes.  Is the creating a mutual fund a creative endeavor? Yes.  Could they both be art?  I think so.

Anyway, Eric Zimmerman makes a nice point about “cinema envy” in games.  As he suggest games engage on an entirely different level than movies.

Steven Spielberg’s notion that games will come of age, “when somebody confesses that they cried at Level 17″ is complete bunk.  Games are a formal medium, not an emotional one.  They are about engaging with and exploring formal systems, not hearing a tale of woe.  In this way they are much more like Pollack’s drip paintings.  These paintings are beautiful, but much of this beauty derives from the system inherent in the painting and how it was created.  Those paintings don’t make me cry, but they do engage me.  Same with games.

www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04lela.html

Michael Lewis wrote a really interesting article in last week’s magazine about Mick Leach the coach of the Texas Tech football team.

The article touches on a myriad of interesting topics from the geometry of football to the perils of breaking with what John Kenneth Galbraith termed “conventional wisdom”.

Coach Leach’s style also suggests an interesting approach to the ways institutions can innovate through probing and improvisation and the interesting results that can produces in extremely formalized systems, such as college football. By changing the way players line up and the ratio of pass plays to runs, Leach and Texas Tech produce some odd resuls on offense, huge runs and high scores from average players.

www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04coach.html

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last week pertaining to game design. It seems the NBA spent a fair amount of time adjusting the rules to tease out higher scoring play. However, they found it took several years for the play to evolve to take advantage of the new rules. Definitely something to keep in mind when designing games. If the result isn’t immdediate, sometime players need time to learn the new system.