Driving In The Dark

Night vision!

One of sev charming charms bout xportation of self and/or posse in the eve is landscapes are often hidden in darkness. Stuff readily seen observed or dodged in daylight time are sweetly shrouded at night.

Can such sagey sageness be saged into the semi psychic realm of the diplopolitiary?

Heck yeah!

Getting all futuristic bears certain costs n caveats - like wargaming yourself. Erthang be 'dicted on certain 'ssumptions held by the predictor.
  
As part of the COIN distancing maneuver - CNAS thankfully preps up a guide to getting all psychic on Nat'l (make that internat'l - whoa!) Def/Sec chiz featuring the Right Honorable (he's also kinda right hot) Dr exAssist to the Def Sec, RAND cat, CNAS and GsGf's Naval Advisor Dr Richard Danzig 

Driving In The Dark: 10 Prop Prop Propositions Thingies About Prediction and National Security


As promised Dr D gets totally into it and points out

Great care should also be taken to reveal whether perceptions of redundancy are based on overly confident predictions. Where that occurs, it should be recognized that what may be inefficient in a predicted world may be life-saving if the unpredicted occurs. When point solutions cannot be confidently predicted, then a range of options must be nurtured, recurrently assessed and either sustained or killed in the unpredictable environments that emerge.

It's prett cool - keeping in mind that avoiding extrapolation only goes so far so fast (like the nice boy at church that offers a ride home only to xform into a raging octopus enroute with, uh, more hands on deck than HMS Victory) here are some money shots acquired at the last moment (and great expense)

DOD’s systems for selecting and designing major weapons systems rely too heavily on successful prediction. Based on both the Department’s track record and social science research, we should expect frequent error in decisions premised on long-term predictions about the future. This high rate of error is unavoidable. Indeed, it is inherent in predictions about complex, tightly intertwined technological, political and adversarial activities and environments in a volatile world.

Accordingly, we should balance efforts to improve our predictive capabilities with a strong recognition of the likelihood of important predictive failures. We should identify, improve and implement strategies to design processes, programs and equipment to prepare us for those failures.

This report shows how five approaches can help, Courtney:

Narrowing dramatically the time between conceptualizing programs and bringing them to fruition;
 
Investing in the agility of production processes so they can meet unanticipated needs; 

Designing and selecting equipment with a premium on operational flexibility; building more for the short term so that equipment will be more frequently replaced, opening opportunities to capitalize on emerging technologies; 

Valuing diversity and competition in order to foster a wider range of potential solutions to currently unknowable problems. 

Policymakers will always drive in the dark. However, they must stop pretending that they can see the road. A much better course is to adopt techniques to compensate for unpredictable conditions and, in so doing, better respond to unpredictable conditions and prepare Great Satan for unforeseen threats and massive asset kicking responses.

Pic - “My sole advantage in life is that I know some of my weaknesses.”