JLJ - Surprise! The future may be unknowable. We can then define success as getting the Big Things
right enough, and for the inevitable errors to be small.
vi we cannot aspire to be surprise-proof. We can, however, aim to be proofed against many, perhaps most,
of the malign effects of surprise.
viii Defense planners... can and should, however, aim to get the really Big Things right enough... "may
all your errors be small ones." ...The Army's transformation plan, privileging flexibility and agility, should minimize the
danger of being caught on the wrong side of truly major decisions... [we need to avoid the condition where] military prowess
is not employed as effectively as it should be in the service of policy.
1. We judge the unknown to be unlikely. S. Douglas Smith, 2004
It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within
a few years. Arthur C. Clark, 1962
2. In the field of war and strategy, there are no new ideas. Rather there is a storehouse of concepts and
theories which are the products of two and a half millennia of intellectual and pragmatic rumination on strategic experience.
"Idea persons," ... go to that storehouse periodically and rediscover the high merit in some well-known, but probably long
neglected, notion.
p.3 [U.S. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld quoted] contending with uncertainty must be a central tenet
in U.S. defense planning... [we must focus on] the broad array of potential challenges of consequence to U.S. interests...
U.S. defense planning must assume that surprise is the norm, rather than the exception. Adapting to surprise - adapting quickly
and decisively - must be a hallmark of the 21st century defense planning.
p.3 The purpose of this monograph is to make a modest contribution to improving understanding of strategic
surprise
p.4 Surprise effect, not surprise, is the challenge... Some unpleasant surprises are reliably avoidable...
Minimum regrets must be a guiding principle.
p.4 Yogi Berra [quoted] "prediction is difficult, particularly about the future."
p.7 philosopher John Gray: "The history of ideas obeys a law of irony. Ideas have consequences; but rarely
those their author expect or desire, and never only those. Quite often they are the opposite."
From Carl von Clausewitz to Rear Admiral J. C. Wylie, USN, great strategic theorists have pointed to control
as being the essence of the practical object in war, the purpose of the strategic effect.
p.8 If strategic surprise is defined as a problem in want of "fixing," then the mission is indeed beyond
rescue.
p.9 the "normal accidents" that afflict all complex systems... all can surprise us. But surprise is not
really the problem. In fact, surprise is not a problem at all, rather a condition of the insecurity in which we must live.
p.10 By definition, surprise is controlled by the enemy... But the consequences of surprise are controlled
by us, not the enemy... surprise prevention, though an important goal, is mission impossible... the defense community as a
whole has no practical choice other than to accept that surprise happens, it is a condition of doing national security business...
Surprise has always been an actual or potential characteristic of warfare.
p.11 I am suggesting strongly that our problem is not surprise and its frustration. Indeed, it is more sensible
to regard surprise as a condition rather than a problem. Instead, our problem is to cope well enough with the effects of those
surprises that we are bound to fail to prevent.
p.12 Strategists of many nations have sought the silver bullet, the magic formula, truly the all purpose
panacea, that should deliver certain victory... the belief in panacea solutions to war's inconvenient complexities and complications
is apparently eternal.
p.13-14 Conceptually, we have stressed the need to distinguish between surprise and surprise effect... To
be caught by surprise is no disgrace for a superpower that has accepted global domain for its security interests... The challenge
to the defense planner and strategist is not to avoid being surprised. Rather it is to plan against some of the more dire
potential effects of surprise... Since surprise cannot be prevented reliably, there is simply no alternative to our focusing
upon its potential consequences... our attention should be drawn far more to the possible consequences of surprise, than to
a forlorn hope to frustrate its achievement... The U.S. Army... can transform itself so that it is "right enough," which is
to say sufficiently adaptable, to cope well enough with the effects of a genuinely wide range of demanding missions... Some
unpleasant surprises should be reliable avoidable. Clausewitz tells us that "[n]o other human activity [than war] is so continuously
and universally bound up with chance... Most important of all is the need to correct avoidable ignorance.
p.19 As a practical matter... those responsible officials have no choice but to do their best from a situation
of irreducible fundamental uncertainty.
p.20 errors in tactics and operations can be corrected in a current war, while mistakes in strategy can
be corrected only in the next.
p.24-25 Thus far the monograph has taken the problem, actually the condition, of future strategic surprise
exceedingly seriously... the stakes may be high. However, we are far from helpless in the face of strategic history's potential
to ambush us. At least, we are far from helpless if we keep our balance, respect what history can teach us is we so allow,
and if we take sensible precautions.
p.25 the writings of those contemporaries, Thucydides and Sun-tzu, and their even more brilliant distant
successor, Clausewitz, still speak to us meaningfully.
p.26 A superpower... cannot anticipate or prevent surprise attacks of all kinds, in all places, at all times...
Competent, or better, armed forces are alert to the perils of surprise attack... We have argued that the problem is not surprise
per se, it is the effect of surprise.
p.27 how does one prepare for surprise and its effects? ... Minimum regrets must be a guiding principle.
p.28 it has to be the goal of defense planners to make only minor errors in their planning.
p.28-29 The great challenge in defense planning is to design and execute a surprise effect-tolerant military
posture... Success for defense planners... can be explained in the vernacular as getting the big things right enough... "may
out future regrets over your decisions be only minor."
p.32 by far the most serious inhibitor of U.S. strategic effectiveness is a seemingly systemic difficulty
in employing military forces in ways that promote the chosen political goals.
