Last week, a blog post by an Army strategist appeared on The Bridge (a
marvelous blog that I highly recommend to military professionals of all
stripes) that posed the following question:
"How would you define the art and science of our profession in one
tweet?"
In this case "our profession" referred to the profession of
arms, and the author put forward a compact solution with an attendant
explication of his reasons that answered the challenge nicely. There is, I
think, more than a little value in an effort like this one, and cutting away
the chaff and getting to the heart of who we are, what we do, and why we do it
is more than just an interesting intellectual exercise. If done well, it provides
a clear and memorable vision that communicates to those on the outside what we
do and to those on the inside why and how we do it (whatever "it"
might be), in this way creating a professional community centered on the
vision. This clarity of vision then has any number of second-order effects on
prioritization, training, recruiting, etc., and the effort to create it can pay
incredible dividends.
As a member of more than one professional community, though, this line
of thinking led me to wonder, "How would you define the art and science of
our military analytic profession in one tweet?" I frequently use the phrasing below when discussing the career field among the analysts with whom I work, though I can't claim credit for its composition. Those who know Mike Payne will recognize it and have likely been part of the ongoing conversation that led to it, but the words are his:
"Analysts learn how things work and explain it to others, usually
in relation to other things and often quantitatively."
This definition (with 22 characters to spare) captures several critical
characteristics of the analytic profession.
- It is general. In many cases, we don't have the luxury to consider ourselves as ISR analysts, force structure analysts, operational assessment analysts, etc. Rather, our particular skills will be applied to whatever question is relevant to leadership.
- Learning how things work is interesting as a standalone activity, but productive of nothing. Communicating the things we learn to those responsible for making decisions is a critical element of who we are as a community.
- Not all analysis is quantitative. There are some tools available to the community of military operations research professionals (mathematical, simulation, etc.) that are in some sense unique, but these are not a sine qua non for analysis. Consider, for example, the analysis given by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow in their iconic book Essence of Decision. Nary an equation is to be found, but it's difficult to dispute that they are seeking to understand a system and explain it to others who will make decisions. Analysis is something done by analysts, and it is independent of the tools used (except for tool between the analyst's ears).
- The systems we study are not isolated, and understanding how they are coupled to other systems is vitally important, both to understand the constraints and restraints imposed by the environment and to illuminate non-proximate effects that may result from changes in the system under investigation.
- It's worth noting what this definition does not do. The word "answer" does not appear, for example. Most questions of interest, do not have clean and precise answers, for example, or they have multiple answers that each have merits making them equally palatable but qualitatively different. So, it is generally not possible for analysis of an interesting problem to produce a single, incontrovertibly trues, and perfectly optimal answer. Thus, we explain to senior leaders how the system works to help them better understand the decision space before them, but we rarely provide answers and to chase these chimerae is ... problematic.
Merf
PS ... There's a fairly robust discussion of this question on Facebook among some of the participants in this thread. You can find it here.
