Great headline for an article in USA Today: “Can small businesses help win the war?“. Apparently the US military have taken note of the success of businesses such as Craiglist, YouTube, and the like, and are studying how traditional businesses are responding. Why? Because Al-Qaeda is a disruptive organisation based on decentralised leadership. See the following:
“How large, traditional companies fare in this
fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaeda.
That’s why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at
the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.
It was written for a business audience, but military strategists are
saying, “This is the best thing I’ve read that applies to
counterterrorism,” says Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department
director in international affairs.
The premise of The Starfish and the Spider
is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed
with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer
decision-making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No
single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back.”
The three-option solution to dealing with a decentralised opponent? Change the ideology that fuels them (aka hearts and minds), centralise them (governments easier to deal with than terrorists; Google takes YouTube), or decentralise yourself. I’m not quite sure how far you can take this analogy (a decentralised military force is a pretty scary prospect), but shows the impact on our culture and ways of thinking that new organisations/ways of doing things are having. And I might be getting hold of that book too….In fact, while we’re at it, here’s Amazon’s list of the top 10 business books from 2006 (for some reason, Amazon.co.uk only has a list of 6, of which only 2 overlap; go figure)
Actually, a decentralized military force has been a winning concept for thousands of years, if we mean the same thing with the word “decentralized” (pardon me, I prefer the “z” spelling).
What’s scary is that the D.O.D. (American Department of Defense) detailed the no-win concept of traditional quantative warfare already in the last years of the 1990’s. Hence, the U.S. military knew that sending a huge number of troops to… any country, in modern times, is a hugely catastrophic failure waiting to happen. The military strategists, historians and analysts predicted and detailed the emergence – and need(!) – of a “laptop soldier”, operating indvidually from the rest of her group. The D.O.D. even declassified parts of information concerning recent Navy Seal operations, for the purpose of describing concrete examples of both how such units would work and of the difficulty in meeting such modern warfare adversaries.
Imagine my astonishment when a 19 century warfare strategy, despite this contemporary information, was deployed on massive scales in at least two countries!