Underpaid Genius

The new air war is where the fighter jets are adopting a Tai Chi attitude instead of Mixed Martial Arts brutalism:

CJ Chivers via NYTimes.com

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

Fighter jets with pilots, however, remain an essential component of the war, in part because little else in the allied arsenal is considered as versatile or imposing, and because of improvements in the aircraft’s sensors.

Commander McDowell’s career has followed the arc of this changing role. At the outset of the war in 2001, American aircraft often attacked in ways that maximized violence, including carpet bombing, dropping cluster munitions and conducting weeks of strikes with precision-guided munitions.

Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war’s first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.

He had already flown the past two years in Kosovo and Iraq, where in 32 combat sorties he dropped 35,000 pounds of guided munitions, including on Serbian barracks that were struck when the largest number of soldiers were believed to be inside.

“Our culture is a fangs-out, kill-kill-kill culture,” he said. “That’s how we train. And back then, the mind-set was: maximum number of enemy killed, maximum number of bombs on deck, to achieve a maximum psychological effect.”

That was then. A little more than a decade on, his most common mission is what is called an “overwatch,” scanning the ground via infrared sensors and radioing what he sees to troops below.

The next transition will be to get the pilot out of the plane, and make it a very large, very capable drone. Jet fighters could be made considerably cheaper if they didn’t have to be designed for people to steer them, and they could pull G forces greater than people can tolerate.

Imagine a single operate controlling a flock of jet drones, where the hivemind logoc of the drones allows them to ‘flock’ while the human controller decides what direction to travel, generally.

It’s been shown that flocks of birds and schools of fish react more quickly and more accurately to threats than the individuals would if alone. Humans can’t do that in squads of jets, but we could build flocks of jet drones that could. And also drone tanks, or ‘trones’.

Jamais Cascio lays out the core paradox of futurism:

In every foresight or forecasting exercise, there are two overarching tensions:

• The more certain and detailed the forecast, the more people will accept it and believe it to be useful.
• The more certain and detailed the forecast, the less likely it is to happen.

This is the foresight paradox: you can be completely accurate, or you can be completely engaging, but you can’t be both. As a result, every forecast (or scenario, or prediction) has to find the right balance between the two, trading off likelihood for believability.

How to bridge this seeming divide? Cascio — like me and others — thinks the best solution is to contrive a set of scenarios, 3-5 for example, that frame some business issue or market direction.This comes with its own set of problems, such as the getting people to consider a ‘field’ of alterntiaves, and to gain some insight from that in a world crammed with other things to think about.

Specifically, Jamais points out that this approach is becoming increasingly impractical in conferences, given the recent trend toward very short presentations:

There seems to be a trend in conferences right now (especially in Europe) to limit presentations to 15 minutes. Although there are definite benefits to this approach (most notably in maintaining audience interest), it means that any foresight-based presentation is crippled. A speaker simply doesn’t have the time to offer multiple scenarios in anything other than a bullet point/headline format, surrounded by lots of big idea framing to give the scenario headlines some context (the talk I gave at the Guardian Activate Summit in London last year is probably my best effort at doing this).

Unfortunately, audiences don’t respond as well to multiple scenarios as they do to single, detailed forecasts, even when they know the detailed forecasts will inevitably be wrong. Moreover, appearances limited by time (such as, in particular, television) make even the headline scenario approach difficult. The best one can do — in my experience, at least, and I’d love to hear better suggestions — is to be sure to offer caveats and use cautious language such as “appears to,” “likely,” and especially “one possibility” (or similar statements underlining that different outcomes are possible).

The modern spectacle-driven media loathes uncertainty, and will almost always give more attention to aggressive certitude (no matter the accuracy) than caution. Many business audiences feel the same way. Sadly, the foresight paradox boils down to this:

The futurists who get the most attention are usually the least accurate.

Snap.