Here we are, at long last, after almost a year, and we have passed a major milestone: we’ve reached the end of Book 1! While not even 100 pages (in paperback) this laid a lot of important ground work. We’ve already been introduced to some of the concepts that Clausewitz is best known for.
Carl being Carl, however, we’re not quite done yet. He needs to add his own commentary to his commentary on war, on which I will add my commentary. Turtles all the way down…
“As the human eye in a dark room dilates its pupil, draws in the little light there is, by degrees imperfectly distinguishes objects and at last sees them quite accurately, so it is in war with the experienced soldier, while the novice only encounters pitch-dark night.” Have I mentioned lately how I adore some of Carl’s turns of phrase? This so perfectly illustrates how experience brings clarity (of sorts, because you never see everything). What Carl doesn’t mention is a peculiarity of night vision: in order to see a thing, you have to look away.
Turns out, thanks to some oddities of the human eye (you can look here for details) there is a blind spot in the middle of your night vision. Under normal circumstances this isn’t too big of a deal, because most of us don’t try to focus too hard on a single object at night. Unless you’re a Soldier on guard duty, in which case you are trying to examine every thing as closely as possible, in order to determine if it is a threat or not. This leads to you having to specifically train to look slightly away from the thing you’re looking at. Yes, it is weird and hard and not intuitive at all.
A analyst in the middle of an investigation often falls victim to something similar. They are so focused on an event, and trying to figure out what exactly is going on, that they fail to understand the event. It is often after stepping back and looking at something else that everything snaps into focus. The lesson: whether on patrol or doing an investigation, keep your head on a swivel.
How do you, as a leader, give your junior personnel this experience? Train as you fight. Which is, of course, easier said than done. “Maneuvers (peace exercises) furnish but a weak substitute… in comparison with real experience in war, but not weak in relation to other armies in which even these maneuvers are limited to mere mechanical exercises of routine.” Training is never enough, but there’s a world of difference between tough, realistic training and walking through a checklist (*cough*audits*cough*). How do you make good training? “Arrange the maneuvers in peace time as to include some of these causes of friction, in order that the judgment, circumspection, even resolution, of the separate leaders may be exercised.”
In other words: train for failure. Ensure that things don’t go according to plan. During my first leadership course, everyone had to lead at least one field mission. During my mission, my squad got utterly wiped out. We basically drove into an ambush from another platoon (for those of you familiar with unit sizes and ambush tactics, you see how we were utterly doomed). That result wasn’t what I got graded on. I was graded on how I led my squad while everything went wrong. I was graded on the fact that I kept a cool head, and remembered how to Soldier. I was graded on how I communicated the plan to my subordinates before and during the mission. While we got horrendously murdered, it was an extremely successful training exercise.
An interesting aspect of such training is that there isn’t a singular correct answer to every scenario. This is a really common feeling for the security analyst, as each one will see something different in the available data. They will have different favorite techniques for parsing data, that may influence what conclusions they are able to draw. And, sometimes, traffic is actually benign. Sometimes there actually isn’t any malware on the box. Sometimes your signature to detect activity fails horribly, or is so resource-intensive that it brings the entire network to its knees. These are all important things for the analyst to experience. Whether in a training environment or the real world, experiencing failure is important to leveling up their skills.
The challenges of the battlefield, whether physical or digital, “must be practiced not so much to accustom the body to them, but the mind.” Coping with failure is a really important psychological thing. So is understanding what you are actually capable of. In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (Spoiler Alert!!) one of the first things the recruits do in basic training with their shiny new bodies is have to run a distance at a speed that none of them would have been able to do while in peak condition in their original bodies. The Drill explains that this isn’t to challenge them physically – their bodies are engineered to precisely this sort of task. This is to let them wrap their heads around the fact that they can do these things. (This stands in contrast to the universe’s SOF, which don’t have previous human lives, so they think nothing of losing a limb during combat because they’re not used to not being able to just get a new one).
In Infosec there’s quite a bit of talk about “imposter syndrome”, what it is, and what it isn’t. In my opinion, part of the problem is that because Infosec is such a broad field, it is hard to know what you’re actually capable of until you try it, but you never get around to trying everything. It can be hard to accustom the mind to your successes and failures just because there’s so many known unknowns out there.
Carl closes by suggesting that another method of leveling up your own forces is to integrate personnel from foreign militaries who have the experience that your personnel lack. We often see this in “assistance” missions. Alternately, what I’ve seen work (though it takes much longer to see returns) is to send your personnel elsewhere to gain valuable experience, and bring that experience back. As one example is sending students to foreign military academies or other formal education. Another example is the Training With Industry program, which allows military members to learn from the corporate universe. Many leaders are reluctant to let their best people go on such programs, but good leaders realize that doing so is in the best interest of the force as a whole.
And with that, we are truly done with Book I: On the Nature of War. Book II will pick up with The Theory of War. Hopefully this doesn’t take another year.