What would it look like if a dominant military had only one purpose- to win wars?

I believe it would be transparent.

It would be honest about its intentions.

A lion does not hide its capabilities. Neither did Khabib Nurmagomedov, Pernell Whitaker, or Fedor Emelianenko.

People say surprise is one of the most important parts of conflict. Sure, it's important. But what is the surprise about?

Is it really about intent or capability?

We knew exactly what intentions, capabilities, tactics, and equipment both the Viet Cong and Taliban had. It didn't stop them from winning.

If you listen to Sylvie Von Duuglas-Ittu talking about deception with Karuhat Sor.Supawan, you'll notice that the surprise they're talking about is in timing.

It's a surprise that comes from following your own rhythm, not from coming out of your rhythm.

At the moment, our policies for militaries and secrecy often involve the kind of secrecy that is an internal break in rhythm. We're sacrificing our own unity for secrecy, and that has consequences.

We've already made steps toward transparency in the United States, with the publications of most of our military manuals.

Israel proved the worth of relative openness too, in the Yom Kippur War.

PART 1: Why Lions Don't Need to Hide
[[The 9/11 Intelligence Failure That Still Haunts Us]]
[[When Your Enemy Knows Everything and Still Loses]]
[[Going After the Friendless and Vicious]]
[[You Only Hide When You're Weak]]

PART 2: What Khabib Knew That The Pentagon Doesn't
[[The Death of Secret Techniques]]
[[Why Knowing Everything Won't Save You]]
[[MMA vs Traditional Martial Arts]]

PART 3: The Fiefdom Problem
[[Why Good People Hoard Data]]
[[Taking Care of Troops Beyond Paychecks]]
[[Noble Work, Not National Embarrassment]]

PART 4: Competition Beats PowerPoint
[[From Garrison Boredom to Constant Competition]]
[[Raiders Beat Drill Teams]]
[[The 10,000-Brain Advantage]]
[[When Hierarchy Kills Excellence]]

The Problem with Data Silos

Our organizations tend towards the creation of data fiefdoms.

The intelligence agencies knew about the people involved in the attacks on 9/11.

Hoarding data, keeping it from other members of your own organization, you have phrases like "need to know," and the classification system: Classified, Secret, Top Secret, and so on.

All with the idea that these things need to be done to maintain an edge.

And sure, there is something to this.

In a war between evenly matched powers, you do benefit from having a secret card or two that you can play.

But for the most part, for everyday operations, you don't have much of an advantage- once the loss of coordination within the organization is taken into account.

As the Cable Cowboy said, "We don't believe in staff. Staff are people who second-guess people."

Try second guessing anything in a fight.

The Power of Transparency

In fact, if you are a liberal democracy, as many nations profess to be, you benefit from using your military as deterrence. If you really are one of the richest militaries on Earth, there's little reason for deception.

In the same way that the lion has no reason to deceive the gazelle. The gazelle knows what a lion is. It's just a question of when you're going to attack.

Even then, when wolves go after prey, it's safe to say that some part of the herd knows who the wolves are going after.

They go after the weak, the young, the lame, the old.

The difference isn't in knowing. It's in doing.

Think about clearing a room.

Every fighter in the world knows the basic pattern- how the team stacks up, how they'll enter, which corners they'll take.

It's not a secret. But watch a really good team do it, and you'll understand why it doesn't need to be.

They're not trying to hide their intentions or data in any way. They're just trying to do their jobs as smoothly as they can.

It's like that moment in wrestling practice when you're paired with someone better than you. You know they're going to shoot for your legs. They know you know. You know they know you know. But they're still going to get your legs.

I can't stress this enough.

A lot of our older decision-makers are informed by a view of secret techniques winning in violent conflict. In our generation it's worse in some ways, when they're informed by say, anime. Where every shonen character has a super secret move they used to beat others.

You know this intuitively. Everyone knows how to play soccer. There's no real secret. Yet an international competitor will beat you every time.

World War II is the beginning of time for our era. The founding myth. So it makes sense that with the Manhattan Project, we lean toward thinking that top secret projects are the only way to win wars.

But look at the history of warfare.

How often was that actually the case?

In real life, unlike Shonen, there are few secrets about what is effective.

Modern Military Strategy

And if you had an effective military, that's what your military would be doing.

Now this might not mean the same kinds of weakness that wolves look for, because, well, you would lose the psychological war that way, wouldn't you?

So you want to go after easy targets from a propaganda point of view: the vicious, the friendless, the people who have just alienated everyone else around them.

You isolate them and then eliminate them.

Conquer the divided, invite the united to a place at the table.

Most colonial governments used to know this.

There are examples with how the extremists in the early formation of Israel were treated.

Hiding

The point is, you only hide things when you're weak. In a lot of arenas, in a lot of games and organizations, we are not weaker.

Whoever purports to value truth, honesty, and openness is usually stronger- that is, they can sense that because they will adapt to whatever reality throws at them, they can afford to side with truth.

Whatever super-secret thing someone has in mind is often an excuse for not being dedicated to excellence.

Lessons from Martial Arts

We can see this on the mats and in the cage.

When people come into a gym saying, "Oh, my best submission is this and that, and I have this secret move that'll defeat you..."

We used to have this in our martial arts dojos, this culture of not sharing information.

Each dojo would have its own lineage, and the idea is that your special moves, your special techniques that you kept in your lineage, kept your lineage dominant. That you could then go to other dojos and only pull that out to beat them, and because they weren't seeing it, you had a surprise.

But in the last thirty years, we've seen that change. People started sharing stuff on YouTube. And even before then, on the mats.

In the culture of BJJ and MMA, people would go from gym to gym learning everyone's so-called secret moves. And you know what?

Knowing all their secret moves doesn't actually help you beat them. And what's more, having special moves that the other person doesn't understand also does not help you beat them.

Excellence Abides

Almost everything Khabib, Fedor, or Roger Gracie used to win– you could know it on month one.

Day one wrestler, day one BJJ person, they're going to be taught all that, at least verbally. But you know what? That's not going to help you in a fight against any of those guys. Even if they're 55 and you're 30, you're going to have a hard time if you don't have the same experience, ability, and commitment to excellence.

And I believe that extends to the platoon, battalion, and division level.

You need concentration of force, fix and flank, and dedication to the aim.

You should not have to hide what you're capable of doing.

That is something that data hoarders do in order to get a sense of importance from the information they hoard, in the same way that traditional martial arts dojos often promoted the persona of their coaches, of their Shifu.

The Challenge of Change

We don't need that in a normal organization, but we do it anyway, and it takes a lot of time and effort and energy just to convince people to share data that they should be sharing with anyone in the organization anyway.

I can see where that comes from. You give your whole life to some industry, some field, some company, and you know they can get rid of you at any time.

The power imbalance is pretty huge.

So what do you do? You start to carve out a little piece of expertise, to have so much walled data they can't fire you.

If they fire you, you take the data with you, and then they spend months or years trying to rebuild it.

So it's perfectly understandable why you would try, at the individual level, at every step of the way, in various bureaucracies, to have a little fiefdom that you protect.

Building a Better System

That's the first thing you would have to address.

If you really wanted to make an army transparent, you would have to give people ways to feel appreciated, to really take care of your troops.

We do a pretty good job of this, relatively speaking, when you compare it to past times, soldiers, and armies.

We take care of our own. We appreciate soldiers materially better than we ever have before, in the United States.

The Need for Deeper Appreciation

But there's more to it than that.

There's a deeper appreciation that we would need to give individuals– an appreciation for the excellence that you see in them, that they are not just another cog in the machine, that they are irreplaceable in some way but also extremely replaceable in the sense that, you know, anyone can shoot a rifle.

An acknowledgement that what they do is noble, and worthy of emulation, rather than an embarrassment to civilization.

Competition and Learning

A transparent army would allow units to learn from each other through friendly competition.

We do have competitions of a sort that happen every year or so. But what if we leaned further into that? So your everyday, in-garrison, peacetime army was constantly competing.

You would have a few months of rest, basically taking on an athletic cycle, until wartime comes.

Cultural Differences and Adaptation

In the propaganda videos from other armies, you can see how Goodhart's law has affected them. It shows people marching, being in line. Drill tricks.

These are all demonstrations of things many people think are necessary for an army to win.

And in a way, they are right.

You do need coordination, but not that kind of coordination. Salsa dancers are coordinated! We are not in the 18th century; we do not do black powder field battles. There's no pike formation here.

Sure, it's valuable in the long-term to understand all those things and to know how to do them because that informs how you understand military figures in history, strategy and tactics.

For understanding the act of conflict, it is important to know everything that came before.

But before pike-shot formations, you had other kinds of formations. And if you go far back enough, you have the raid in every small-scale society. We don't train that enough, in the regular armed forces.

The Power of Collective Learning

If you had a competition within the military of units being put up against each other continuously, I think you could usher in a bigger collective brain, and that alone would be huge.

Innovation is tied to population size. The more people you have thinking about a problem, the more innovation you see around that problem.

This is where you get to the real "So Good They Can't Ignore You." This is so good, it doesn't matter if they know all your secrets. This is actually within reach for the US military, and I think for other rich militaries as well.

We know this already, with publications like 'The Squad Leader Makes a Difference'.

Cultural Barriers to Learning

You can imagine most other traditional martial arts, or even places where they don't have that individualistic freedom as much in the culture.

I visited Southeast India, and while I was there, I went to a few BJJ gyms. Most of them could not escape the old hierarchical method of learning.

Which is to say, there's a pecking order. You have to wait so long before you can spar. And then once you spar, you have to wait so long before you can use this move and that move, and there's a whole order to it that works well within that structure of that particular gym.

But you take those fighters and put them up against a group of people who are constantly exchanging information, and guess what? A free exchange group is going to smash them.

Grind them to dust.

The Power of Exchange

This comes back to the old MMA versus traditional martial arts argument. What's the difference between a mixed martial artist and a traditional martial artist in the early 90s?

A Mixed Martial Artist was just someone from a particular lineage who was interested in other lineages. Who went to figure out what everyone else was doing and learned from each of them.

It's this culture of exchange that gives people power over others. And you know what? You can't fake it.

I bet this is the real advantage, every time:
-Units that train together constantly
-Troops who can think on their feet
-Leaders who aren't afraid to share information
-Battle practiced until it's second nature
-Rock hard pride from competition

Instead, back in my day, we had PowerPoint. That, really, was our chief interest.

Going through that DoD deck and checking a box so someone higher could get a different box checked that would lead to more shinies on their uniform.

A Department of War, on the other hand, should be different.

The primary skill for a Department of War is combat at all scales.

The one purpose for a Department of War is winning wars.

That's it.

Everyone, including your 48 GT Score gunbunny, will understand that. And an aim that everyone can understand is an aim that the collective can execute.