Overcoming the Dangers of Insular Communities

This excerpt from a guest post on Marc Lynch's blog caught my eye. Brian Katulis writes:

There are several must-read blogs out there - the COIN nerds have some interesting insights, but let's face it, their musings tend to be a bit blinkered by self-referential navel gazing with an overemphasis on the U.S. military and what U.S. boots on the ground do. That's a limited perspective and doesn't lend itself to a complete analysis of the political, social, and economic trends happening out in the real world.

Speaking as a fan of and participant in that community, I've been thinking the same thoughts for a while now. My love affair with the COIN community began when the dissidents took over the Iraq war, and I realized they actually knew what they were doing. After years of growing disillusionment with some of my leaders, I finally found a community of competent, intelligent military professionals I could trust. I can't overstate how important that was to me personally. Over the past year I've been drawn deeper and deeper into the COIN community. I follow its blogs, read its recommended books, and study the debates among of its members. The contributions of this community are extraordinary and I am constantly learning from it.

However, I've become attuned to some insidious dangers in my participation. First, my reading has become much too specialized. Over the past few months I've found myself reading the exact same thing as every other member of the COIN community. I read multiple reports on Iraq and Af-Pak each day, but have a stack of issues of The Economist and Foreign Affairs that I've never opened. In the past couple months I've read books like Fiasco, The Gamble, The Unforgiving Minute, This Man's Army and Dereliction of Duty (all excellent books) but I haven't touched much philosophy, literature, or economics. Second, I've devoted much of my intellectual energy to a specialized set of problems--the same problems the rest of the COIN community is working on. Innovative, out-of-the-box thinking requires seeing past the immediate situation in front of you and seeing what's not there: unrealized threats, untried possibilities, alternative ways of solving problems. This kind of thinking requires imagination, creativity, and a broad cross-disciplinary education. Granted, we want our best strategic minds figuring out how to win the wars we're in, but we also want creative independent thinkers who can see down the road and look where nobody else is looking. The problem with the Army's emergent intellectual community isn't with what it's saying; the problem is what it's not saying. Its gurus are focusing on only one subset of world affairs, through one specific lens. That's fine, as long as we recognize it and adapt.

Over the course of history, knowledge has become more and more compartmentalized. This parallels the division of labor in economic activity. This has its advantages, but it also has its dangers. Thinkers tend to form insular communities with their own assumptions, frameworks, and ideas. Bringing different communities together can be a challenge, and it is rare to find individuals who are comfortable participating in multiple communities at one time. Our information age exacerbates this problem, because the Internet allows a more perfect division of intellect. People self-organize into like-minded, self-reinforcing communities and infrequently interact with others. The blogosphere is probably the ultimate example, and the COINosphere is no exception.

So what should we do? First, we need to recognize the potential dangers of a homogeneous community and create an atmosphere that encourages dissent and cross-pollination with other communities. Second, we need to teach people how to think, and not what to think. Third, we need to emphasize broad education. Individuals should deliberately seek knowledge outside of the community. Sharp soldiers shouldn't just study military history (although that is important). They should also study economics, psychology, environmental science, literature, computer science, regional affairs, or any of a thousand other fields. And let's not forget firsthand life experience. A soldier who wants to learn about the world should travel, volunteer to work with young people in an inner city, visit a mosque, go to a human rights film festival, attend a technology expo, visit an anthropology exhibit at the local museum, or do a thousand other things. He should deliberately seek experiences outside his race, economic class, religion, academic field, and profession. His news should come from multiple sources with different biases. Fourth, the military should institutionalize ways of drawing on the expertise of other communities: exchange programs between military officers and other agencies (both governmental and nongovernmental), conferences with non-military organizations, interagency wargaming, etc.

All of this should sound familiar to the members of the COINosphere, because most of them have been arguing the same thing in the face of an intellectually stagnant military culture. For the most part they have triumphed. Now they must be careful not to become the thing they fought against.

UPDATE: Abu Muqawama responds to the above "COIN Nerd" quote here.