Physics of the Future and Force Structure

I've just finished Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future.  In this work, Kaku describes the state of science, technology, and engineering in the areas of computation, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, space travel, the meaning of wealth, and the future of human civilization.  He then extends this discussion to speculate on the shape of each discipline and the consequences for life and civilization in the long (2070-2100), mid (2030-2070), and near (present to 2030) terms.

I don't want to dwell on the aspects of Kaku's work that bother me, but I can't resist (very) briefly touching on a few.  

• I'm always a little troubled by the inveterate optimism of some folks (especially those with an unshakable faith in science to make the world better).  This is some of my own pessimism and misanthropy coming through, so my judgement should come with a grain of salt.  I'm not asking for dystopic visions of the future, but Kaku is really unbalanced in his approach.
• My teeth always start to ache when physicists start talking about international relations, psychology, economics and other fields in which they are (at best) dilettantes.  (To be fair, I'm similarly troubled when experts in international relations betray their misunderstanding of science.)  Kaku has a lot to say on these subjects and the pedigree of his conclusions sets off alarms in my little dilettante brain.
• Kaku completely ignores a fundamental aspect of human interaction--war.  (Of course, my calling this element of human interaction fundamental betrays my Hobbesian outlook, but "to thine own self be true.")  This gap is filled, to an extent, by others.  (E.g., The Next 100 Years: A Forecast of the 21st Century by George Friedman is a nice look at the interaction of technology, social change, geopolitics, and war.  Robert Kaplan does some of the same things, though with a lens that doesn't seek to see quite so far.  Etc.)  I just wish a survey of science as wide-ranging as Kaku's touched on military science as well.  (Discursive aside...I think it bears mentioning that any discipline using "science" as a noun modified by some discipline-related word--in a quest for the illusion of rigor that only comes from science in our post-enlightenment minds--will never be an actual science.  Just saying.) 

It's this last that brings me to the reason for my post here.  (The questions that follow are not new, I suppose, but in the interest "read, think, write"...)  What are the implications of the radical changes Kaku foresees and military science, warfare, and therefore the force structures we project and for which we plan?  These changes include: quantum leaps in expert heuristics and expert systems enabled by advances in artificial intelligence and computation; widespread use of driver-less cars, with implications for all sorts of remotely piloted, semi-autonomous, and autonomous vehicles; nano-machines performing medical miracles (and, as Kaku does not note, acting as weapons); profound changes in sources of energy (including the side-effect of nuclear proliferation); expansion of space programs (manned and unmanned...with implications for the military domain, something not noted by Kaku); etc.  Note that he predicts these changes in the near term (by 2030), the first period of his speculation (the mid and late century predictions are much more extreme); this period obviously falls squarely in line with our Air Force long-range force structure timelines.

So...1) Can we meaningfully incorporate these speculations into force structure analysis?  2) Should we do so?  3) If so, how would such speculative force structure analysis work?

Merf

The Point of Know Return...Running Out of Prime Numbers

In April of this year a relatively obscure mathematician named Yitang Zhang set the world of mathematics on it’s ear when he proved that no gap between two prime numbers will ever exceed 70,000,000.  That’s a pretty audacious claim and it must be wrong.  But mathematically he seems to have proven something that many others have tried...and failed to do.  And he appears to have the support of many an esteemed mathematician.  If prime numbers continually get larger, but the gap between them ceases to increase for very large values...and I mean very large values (the largest prime number currently known is 2^57,885,161 − 1, to put that into your calculator you would have to punch 2 x 10 to 57,885,161 and then subtract 1)...will prime numbers eventually run out? Yitang says no...but since prime numbers are the building blocks of all other numbers, it stands to reason that once you run out of gap, you eventually run out of prime numbers between the gap, and then ultimately you run out of numbers.  Does this mean we can stop counting? Can you imagine the end of the number line?  Kind of like the end of the Earth.  There’s a giant waterfall and over you go.  Or, perhaps like the Mayan calendar, maybe we just start counting all over again...it actually isn’t the apocalypse, it’s just a Y2K scare. 

If it’s true, God will have to go back to the drawing board because it seems, he meant to refer to infinity as simply a concept since personally he was never actually able to count that high.  Since Yitang’s proved we still have infinite pairs of prime numbers, even though the gap between them grows not larger then 70 million, his math must be wrong.  Regardless he has created quite a stir since many are believing his math to be correct.  In situations such as these, I tend to cast a skeptic's eye on the situation.  If he’s reached an upper bound, no matter how good his math might be, if it means the end of the number line, either there is no such thing as the infinite or he has made a error. Personally, I hope there is an end to the number line.  That will end our search for things that don’t matter.  Professionally, however, I sense there must be some mistake.  Kind of like neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.  Go back and check the math there is an error in the assumption.

What’s left to do, however, is to prove, or disprove, that the number of twin pairs of prime numbers, prime numbers separated by a gap of 2, could be infinite.   The two seem quite different yet are clearly tied together.  If it turns out that prime numbers separated by a gap of 2, are infinite, then again Yitang’s math has to be wrong.  If it turns out that they are not infinite, then his math is correct but his assumption that prime pairs are infinite has to be incorrect, and therefore we eventually run out of numbers. Either way it has to be wrong because we can’t run out of numbers...they are an artificial abstraction that we can always increase by 1.

Therefore the error here could be the limit theorem.  If you chose a number such as “infinity” to approach, you have chosen a bound. Therefore you can find another bound, inside that bound, if you look far enough.  What this means, simply, is that it’s time to expand our definition of infinity...  Instead of the world getting smaller, since we reached the end of the number line under our current definition of infinity, the world just got bigger.  The point of know return, therefore, just got a whole lot stranger.

Reading Lists

Perhaps I should be ashamed of "re-blogging" an item from Tom Ricks' blog on Foreign Policy, but I can never resist a new reading list.  You'll find the reading recommended by the UK's Chief of Defence Staff here.  Of this list, he writes,

"I cannot predict the future. But I can predict that it will test our intellectual mettle. We will have to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, to decide how best to achieve the necessary outcomes, and to persuade others of the need to act in a timely and effective fashion. We will have to do this in ways that reflect and advance our national interest and make best use of the resources that we are provided with.  This will increasingly require a breadth and depth of contextual understanding, an ability to interpret the lessons of history, agile and creative thinking, and a dedicated professional approach to all that we do, be that on operations or in the office. This web page is designed to tempt readers into developing such attributes. It contains lists of books and articles that will provide intellectual stimulus for those who work in or with Defence, be they military or civilian."

This is not necessarily the most original sentiment, but it is perhaps as close to truth as one can get (at least in this regard).  Mooch has started a nice list here (of both required and interesting reading), but I wonder...

• What is NOT on these lists (the UK's and Mooch's) that should be?
• What IS on the list that should not be?  Why?
• What is it that shapes our views on what comprises the "right" list of recommended reading?  For analysts?  For military professionals?

Essentially--in the spirit of the first element of "read, think, write"--I wonder what our cannon is, what it should be, and why.

STORM and EW?

I received an oddly specific question today, and wondered what this community thinks.  The question dealt with the utility of STORM--my favorite "campaign" model--for assessments involving electronic warfare.  I'm generally not a fan of campaign models for a variety of reasons (OK..."not a fan" may understate the case), but it has been about two years since I dealt seriously with STORM in general and its application to electronic warfare in particular.  So, I'm willing to plead a certain amount of ignorance.  What's the state of this art?

Any thoughts?

Merf

The Revenge of Geography

This post is a perhaps a bit outside the norm for an analysis forum--depending, I suppose, on how one defines "discussions in the analysis realm"--but I just finished reading Robert Kaplan's most recent book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Is About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, and I couldn't resist sharing.  (If the urge to read the full work doesn't consume you, an article length treatment published in Foreign Policy is available here.)

Amazon summarizes the book as building "on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene."  These great geographers and geopolitical thinkers include people to admire (Sir Halford Mackinder whose Democratic Ideals and Reality should be required reading for every policy analyst; Alfred Thayer Mahan; Sir Julian Corbett; Nicholas Spykman, etc.) and some, such as Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism, for whom the opposite sentiment will dominate.  This is a fairly long-winded way of saying that the first half of Kaplan's work is very much a book-report regurgitating the ideas of others.  While I happen to prefer reading the primary sources (see the seminal strategic works of Mahan and Corbett, for example, that are available online here and here through the genius of Project Gutenberg) Kaplan's summary is worth reading as an introduction.  With this introduction then in hand...

..the second half of the book then applies the principles of geopolitics to Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, the rest of the Middle East and the former Ottoman Empire, and to the relationship between the United States and Mexico.  It's almost as if the rest of the book is a prelude to the central point Kaplan wishes to make regarding U.S. grand strategy vis-a-vis our "failing" neighbor to the south.  (This last comes with shades of George Friedman's work in The Next 100 Years, and makes one wonder if Kaplan's STRATFOR connection is showing through.)  This discussion addresses the geopolitical motives for each of the regions and states described, illuminates the geopolitical seams along which conflict may concentrate, and makes implicit and explicit suggestions regarding U.S. policy based on these geopolitical discussions.

So, why do I offer all this up?  First, it's refreshing to see the unfairly maligned--and, in my opinion, very powerful--discipline of geopolitics given a hearing, especially from a voice likely to resonate in policy circles.  Second, in the world of force structure analysis (the world in which I was analytically raised) these issues seem to matter a great deal.  Identifying the potential (dare one say likely?) contexts and causes of future conflict matters in determinations of force posture (e.g., the pivot to Asia that we're not supposed to call a pivot), basing, capability requirements, etc., has obvious value in my little world.  These questions can be viewed absent considerations of geopolitics, of course, but the additional rigorous analytic lens these considerations offer seems quite powerful (and multiple lenses is usually best, it seems, to avoid being trapped by our assumptions).

What thinkest thou?

Merf

Nail your whispers to the wall...

So, I've been suffering through Air War College recently (suffering less because of the material and more because of the timelines and integrity-stealing loss of soul to which the associated incentive structure for correspondence PME has driven me), and ran across a nice speech/article from Admiral James Stavridis.

Not so very long ago, ADM Stavridis addressed the Class of 2012 at the National Defense University.  (The remarks he offered that day appeared as a JFQ article titled Read, Think, Write: Keys to 21st Century Leadership; an alternative version appeared as Read, Think, Write, and Publish in the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute.)  The advice he offered that day was simple and encapsulated by three words: read, think, and write.  Stavridis claims,

The quintessential skill of an officer[or, methinks, an analyst] is to bring order out of chaos. You have to be calm, smart, and willing to do the brain work; in the end, 21st-century security is about brain-on-brain warfare. We will succeed not only because we have more resources, or because our values are the best, or because we have the best demographics or geographic advantages—all of those things matter, of course. But in today's turbulent security environment, we will succeed and defeat our enemies by out-thinking them. To do that, and to be successful senior officers, you need to read, think, and write.

He then tells us our "reading should include not only history, politics, diplomacy, economics, and so forth, but also great fiction, books from distant cultures, and perhaps even a little poetry."  (I would add math and science to this list, because that's the kind of guy I am, and I've become a frequenter of several blogs.)  This reading will, one hopes, help us to "think our way to success in incredibly complex scenarios."  This is actually how I use most of my reading in the blog-sphere, to put me on a path to thinking about a particular problem or set me on the trail of suggested related reading.

It is the last of his injunctions, however, that challenged me very directly and led to my inflicting this post on all of you.  Satvridis argues that after we read and think we must write, since "it is essential for communicating what we have learned, as well as allowing others to challenge our views and make them stronger."  (This recalls a favorite quote of mine from Proverbs: "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpens thecountenance of his friend.")  He encourages us to "share our ideas in print--a scholarly journal, a military magazine, or even a blog post." 

I have been remiss in this regard.  I read much, think much (at least I hope it is thought), and write far too little.  Mooch has offered us this forum in which friends may nail their whispers to the wall (borrowing a lovely phrase from the Admiral), and where each may sharpen the countenance of the others.  It's almost as if this blog sprang into being from the tears of Admiral Stavridis.  Be not afraid, but I plan to avail myself of this forum far more in the future.

Merf