196: Rashomon
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Larry Keeley is one of those guys with the job that the more he tries to explain to you what it is that he does for a living, the more you think people pay you for that? He can tell us with companies about innovation, about how to organize themselves to be more competitive, more inventive, foster new ideas, that kind of thing. So February of last year, he's giving a talk about all this to some executives who've gathered at a fancy golf course in Florida, and after the talk, two military men in the audience asked him to launch, is it being served, one of them asked what he knew about the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center building. So he's asking me if I knew any of the details, and I said no. He started to tell me the gory details about the analysis of that bombing, and of course what they use are people who go in afterwards and do forensic analysis of a calamity, and what was fascinating about the forensic analysis is that the forensic teams didn't quite agree. You know, some said the bombs were placed 12 centimeters away from where they would have needed to be to destroy the major support column in the North Tower. The other said, no, no, no, you got it all wrong, the bombs were four centimeters away from where they needed to be to destroy that column. Either way, pretty alarming. And it turns out that one of the guys I'm lunching with is a major general, George Close, a brilliant guy, and he turns out to be handpicked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to think through something called the Revolution in Military Affairs. When I got a little bit of explanation about this revolution in military affairs, they said, we're in the middle of one, and I said, okay, and they said they don't happen very often. We think there's been maybe 12 of them in history. What that means is that everything that is normal in the way we engage, fight a conflict and win it, will go through a change. So one of the early historic examples was the invention of gunpowder. And you think about the world of gladiator, and you see the kind of conflict that gunpowder transformed forever, people that are rushing up to the enemy with their horses, wearing 300 pounds of armor and rushing up to the enemy and whacking him with something sharp. That was the nature of battle in those days. Well gunpowder comes along. Anions get cheap, they put them on wheels, they can haul them to the enemy's fortress. That's a revolution in military affairs, and I'm sitting there listening to this and they've happened so seldom in the history of the world. Every time a revolution in military affairs has occurred in history, the party in power at the beginning has not been in power at the end, and they got a lot of historians at the Pentagon and those historians had convinced the senior generals that we were in the midst of a revolution in military affairs with these basic principles. Which brings us to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. These particular generals were convinced that it was an example of this new kind of warfare, the way the thing was organized, through a web of operatives, the Lothak way it was carried out, the fact that it was on American soil and targeted at something so symbolic as the World Trade Center towers. February of last year, these Pentagon officials were trying to think about how they should fight back, and they wanted to learn to think differently. They wanted to learn to think like their enemy, so they caught on a bunch of guys from the private sector like Keeley for advice on how to think differently, how to change. US military strategy right now is based on the idea that we will win wars through overwhelming force.
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