The goal of 'futuring' is not to predict the future but improve it. We want to anticipate possible or likely future conditions so that we can prepare for them. We especially want to know about opportunities and risks that we should be ready for.
-Edward Cornish from the Proteus Mission Statement
This chapter focuses primarily on two bodies of source material. The first is the 2006 Counter-Insurgency Field Manual and the documents and transcripts surrounding its development. The Manual was developed in responses to the apparent failure of the Rumsfeld Revolution in Military Affairs to produce success in Iraq. General David Patreaus and John Nagl headed up a team of military personnel, journalists, human rights activists, academics and politicians to develop a new theory of warfare. The manual represents a victory for those like John Nagl that insisted that the U.S. armed forces had willfully ignored the lessons and failures of Vietnam. According Nagl insurgency defines modern warfare and the United State military is in no way structured to fight a war of insurgency.
The second body of source material comes from an international network of academics, security intellectuals, and military theorist named Project Proteus. The focus of the program and their sponsored publications and conferences is the integration of new scientific insights into complexity and chaos to benefit the national security of the United States.
The basic upshot of this chapter is that the Counter-insurgency manual and Project Proteus are attempts to control or dominate complexity. There is in both an attachment to transcendence or redemption. Complexity is reduced to an effect of limited knowledge rather than accepting it as a metaphysical principle of the universe. The alleatory is not actually a ‘chance’ or the entry of the new it is simply the inability to accurately quantify the terms. Even when those within Proteus seem to accept the chaos at the heart of the system being studied—the earth—it is instrumentalized as a necessary precondition for making better, more effective decisions. Risk and the possibility of eliminating risk just-in-case fills in the for the ‘incomplete’ calculation of the system. Proteus’s harnessing of complexity theory becomes a way to ensure the logic of the preemptive doctrine. Uncertainty can only be managed by determining potentiality and violently ‘erring on the side of caution.’
By way of critique I attempt in this chapter to explain why the attempt to mimic the enemy ‘swarm’ and predict the future ultimate fail. In part, I argue, this is because the insurgent approach is much closer to the war machine. The weapons used are almost purely expressive or excessive in the sense that they exist in a liminal space between strategic and tactical actions. The tactic of creating more death and disorder (normally indexed in military terms as failure) is an end in itself. The anti-colonial lesson that is apparent in the fighting stile of those in Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is power in “weakness.” While the U.S. Military can mimic network organizations it cannot give up on the chain of command, unified war aims and other control protocols that predispose it to an aboreal liability.
I also speculate that Al-Qaeda in so far as it exists is also more aborescent than insurgency and thus is more likely to engage the U.S. Military on the battlefield. Al-Qaeda is ‘tree-like’ at the level of religious ideology. Al-Qaeda like the U.S. military aspires for the state form in relationship to territory. As a result the U.S. Military and Al-Qaeda will fail to succeed at holding their respective territories because of the war machines that disrupt or re-territorialize the battlefield.
Proteus Mission Statement
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