Spaghetti: systems thinking and the US Army

ABSTRACT

In the mid-2000s, the United States Army was embroiled in counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan that required deeper understanding of local social systems. The Army turned to systems thinking and design thinking to model and understand the world, define problems, and develop approaches to strategic and operational challenges. However, the Army’s approach as expressed in publications and doctrine encourages the development of complicated, unsupported, and unfalsifiable hypotheses. The risk is that the Army will act on incorrect assumptions and develop plans that are fragile.

KEYWORDS:

• Systems
• design
• complexity
• chaos
• military planning
• United States Army
• strategy
• operations

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank G. Stephen Lauer, Michael Flynn, Todd Ebel, Daniel Cox, Bruce Stanley, and Peter Farese for offering comments on the draft of this paper. The points of view expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the US Department of Defense or its components.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bumiller, Elizabeth. “We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is PowerPoint.” New York Times, 26 April 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html. The slide was developed by PA Consulting Group in 2009 as part of the presentation titled “Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan.” Accessed 14 May 2018. http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/Afghanistan_Dynamic_Planning.pdf.

2. Project RAND began as a contract to Douglas Aircraft Company for the US Army Air Forces in 1945 but in 1948 spun off to become the first think tank. (RAND Corporation n.d.) It remained a critical nexus for researchers, and particularly quantitative researchers, who served as RAND employees or acted as consultants.

3. The gulf between science and postmodern understandings of science was illustrated by the Sokal “Social Text Affair,” in which quantum physicist Alan Sokal pranked the cultural studies journal Social Text. The journal accepted and published his spoof article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” without recognizing that it was a parody. The article was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics … from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals.” (Sokal 1998). It was followed by a book, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, co-written with French physicist Jean Bricmont. (Sokal and Bricmont 1998) Although critics argued that Sokal and Bricmont misunderstood the texts they criticized, this underscores the fact that postmodernists were using scientific terms and ideas very differently and were not engaged in science.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. A. Thomas

M. A. Thomas is a professor of social science at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies. She has a BA in computer science from UC Santa Cruz, a JD from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in leading academic and policy outlets, including International Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The American Interest. Her 2015 book, Govern Like Us: U.S. Expectations of Poor Countries, was published by Columbia University Press.