Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Reconceptualising Strategy: Ben Zweibelson on Strategy, Complexity, and Multi-Paradigm Thinking

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 16

Share episode

We don’t just fight wars with weapons, we fight them with ideas, metaphors, and assumptions we don’t even question.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Ben Zweibelson—veteran, military strategist, and author of Reconceptualizing War—to explore why our dominant paradigms of strategy are failing us. They unpack the hidden structures behind military thinking, why complexity demands more than doctrine, and how multi-paradigm design can unlock radically different ways of seeing and acting.

This is not just about warfare. It’s a challenge to how we think, how we plan, and how we lead in a world that refuses to conform.

🔍 In this episode:

Why most strategy is trapped in a single paradigm

The difference between functionalism, complexity, and interpretivism

How militaries (and organisations) mistake activity for understanding

Why the irreversibility of time matters for decision-making

What multi-paradigm thinking looks like in practice

How language, design, and philosophy shape strategic failure or success

🎧 Keywords: Strategy, military thinking, complexity, war, paradigms, decision-making, design, multi-paradigm, functionalism, interpretivism, uncertainty

📘 Learn more about Ben’s work: https://www.helion.co.uk/military-history-books/reconceptualizing-war-.php


Send Mike a Message

👂 Enjoying the show?
Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast.

🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout

💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Guest (00:11)
know yourself, know others, and then think.

more creatively than your adversary. And I believe the areas of innovation and creative thinking and critical thinking requires a multi-paradigmic view. If we don't have this, we are at a handicap. And if our adversary has this, they have the advantage, no matter what.

Mike Jones (00:27)
Yes.

Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm your host Mike Jones and today I'm glad to announce I'm joined by Ben Zweibelsen. Is that correct? cool. It's great to have you on the show and just for the listeners to get a feel about you, can you give a quick introduction about yourself and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

Guest (01:14)
Yep, that's right, you nailed it Mike, thanks. That's the only time you can say it.

Sure, I'm a retired American Army soldier. I did 22 years in the military. Before that I was an art student, fine art student, was kind of odd. ⁓ But over last 10 years or so, I've really been on this kind of intellectual journey, challenging what strategy is, how we look at warfare, conflict, a lot of philosophy. So my doctorate's in philosophy and...

Mike Jones (01:38)
Well, yeah. ⁓

Guest (01:52)
I still work in the military now as a government employee, but this work I've been doing academically, this is separate, this is kind of my passion to bring things back to the military to help teach the next generation. So I do a lot of writing, lot of lecturing, a lot of speaking, a lot of blogging, all sorts of stuff. And actually this book is my third book, Reconceptualizing War, through Helion and Company, which is a UK publisher.

And today, if we want, I'm actually going to sign with Helion, have the contract on my computer to commit my fourth book, which is done, and it'll publish, yeah, it'll publish in the spring of next year, 2026, and this book, this new one is called Bad War Stories. And so that's brand new information for not just for your viewers, but this is the first public announcement that...

Mike Jones (02:27)
yeah.

Guest (02:41)
Bad War Stories is a non-fiction memoir that's based on all the real events that I experienced in four combat tours to Iraq, to Afghanistan. And this, honestly for me, was a decompression from writing the book we're going to talk about today, Reconciliation War, which is a very, very heavy philosophical and sociological lift. It's got thousands of footnotes, it's 742 pages. It hurt my head to write it. So the new book, yeah, there it is. Look at that.

Mike Jones (03:02)
Yes.

I've got it here.

Hehehehe

Guest (03:08)
If you don't like the book, it's good as a self-defense weapon or holding a door open.

Mike Jones (03:12)
Hahaha

It is a very good book. I must admit I'm not all the way through because I only recently got it but I'm majority way through and I've really enjoyed it. But to your point about your new book you're writing, you say you're about to sign the contract. you want?

Guest (03:26)
Yeah, yeah, so if you want, since we're on video here, let me hit share screen. And let's just do something kind of cool for, let's see, how do I do this?

all right now can you see the contract all right let's do this so live for viewers there it is and bam signed so now

Mike Jones (03:37)
There we go cool. Oh wow that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is you

Happy days. So that's going to be for your

fourth book.

Guest (03:53)
yet as the fourth book that'll be out ⁓ next us next spring and it again in this is a shorter book that war stories and it's a it's a series of different chapters is done is is like a catch twenty two meets pulp fiction where i do everything kind of out of order but each chapter talks about inexperience or series experiences that i had in one of my combat tours but this is not your

Mike Jones (04:08)
Hmm.

Guest (04:18)
garden variety military memoirs, know, there I was, know, knee deep in hand grenade pins and all this nonsense, right? This is much more appealing to military veterans and for the general public who really want to know what is combat really like? What are the things that really happen? And for most infantry and ground pounders and people that are out there every day, it's mostly boring and uncomfortable and hot.

Mike Jones (04:43)
Mmm.

Guest (04:44)
and irritating and then there's brief moments of confusion and shock and sometimes excitement mixed with a lot of other emotions and then also a lot of sadness and there's a lot of things that you see where you say how is our how our organizations doing this why do we do this this this is insanity and yet you keep doing it and you know real quick then yeah i was my last tour in afghanistan

Was during one of the drawdowns in 2014 and I was smashing satellite phones in a dumpster in Kandahar to get them off my forward property books because of the rules for money and equipment Made it so that you couldn't even bring it back with you and use it on your rear property books because that was those things were paid for with different money and so they couldn't leave that yes it

And then over a few, about a half a mile away, they were shredding MRAPs, those large, bulky, up-armored, they were shredding them and destroying them. And you're looking around going like, this is madness. Why, what are we doing? So the book is filled with a lot of things like that, but that's more of like a, that's more of like a fun decompression for me. ⁓ This book, the book we're going to talk about today, Reconceptualize Your War, which is available now.

Mike Jones (05:55)
Yeah.

Guest (06:01)
on Amazon and at Casemate and then if you're in the UK you want to go to the Helion and Company website because that's the lowest price and in the UK the shipping and everything is great. you don't live in the UK it's a little more expensive so think Amazon is probably the best option. But this book Reconceptualizing War this looks at the philosophy of what our species determines as organized violence conflict.

And I look at, I take a modern framing of what we as a species do right now, but I base it upon everything that's kind of led us to this point. So we're going back into the Napoleonic era. We're gonna go back all the way to Sun Tzu. We're gonna go back to Greco-Roman origins. And even before that, I even briefly touch on Paleolithic and ⁓ hunter gatherers, right?

Mike Jones (06:46)
Yeah,

Yeah. And I like that because when you think about strategy and the modern version of strategy, a lot of that has come from people talk about Sun Tzu, Clausewitz all those as the of the forefathers of strategy. So it's good to understand where this will come from and what has led to this point where this is how we view the world and how we adopt and execute strategy.

Guest (07:10)
Right, right. And what we say strategy is today is very different from what strategy originally was comprised of and understood of. And between that there's a split because if we talk about the early, the antiquities of the beginning of human civilization and we look at when we were able to lay down agriculture to then afford ourselves to have specialized jobs. we had,

priests, had ruling leadership, and we had military, and we had some sort of law enforcement, and some sort of... All these things were possible only after we abandoned being hunter-gatherers. And if we look back with anthropologists, and anthropologists have really studied this hard, and one of those very difficult, maybe impossible to answer questions is was there war all the way back to our primordial origins, right?

Mike Jones (07:44)
Hmm.

Mm.

Guest (08:02)
So

hunter gatherers and we, don't, nobody can say definitively. You can't really say, but the evidence that's currently available, number one, you look at cave paintings, right? And so the cave paintings are there and me being a originally a fine artist and oil painter, I'm an extension of the cave painters, right? This is beautiful cosmic element, but they didn't paint war. They painted hunting.

Mike Jones (08:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah

Guest (08:26)
and they painted a lot of other things but they didn't paint war ever they've never found a war painting which is challenging okay and then we look at the tools and the weapons and the items that they've left behind and they appear to be exclusively used for hunting now was were there acts of primitive violence certainly certainly you look at all sorts of examples but

Mike Jones (08:28)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (08:49)
This is important in the book and I use three primary sources for this book. First is philosophy overall. And with that comes the work of Anatole Rappaport, who was a very important games theorist in the 20th century. He did philosophy, did mathematics, he did complexity theory, he all these amazing things. But...

He's kind of a persona non grata in most military circles because he was a prolific Vietnam war activist, anti-war activist. So much so that he actually fled the United States and spent the rest of his life in Canada and said he didn't want to have anything to do with the United States after that, even though he fought in World War II, or he served in World War II. The other two are sociologists, Burrell and Morgan.

Mike Jones (09:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Mmm.

Guest (09:33)
and they established social paradigm theory and so I use those as my cornerstone. But the challenge then becomes violence, human beings, violence, right? So there's organized violence, this is what we're categorizing as conflict and war, and then it's not disorganized violence, but it's just violence, and that's the thing that falls outside. So this is crime, this is...

domestic strife, assault, all sorts of things that happened. And so did that happen in hunter-gatherer period? Of course. And in fact, that was probably the leading form of violence because you didn't have organized violence until you had civilizations. You had to have enough specialization to have some sort of political ideological leadership that could

Mike Jones (09:56)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah.

Guest (10:16)
charged the society with saying, we're going to war and here's why. And then you had to have a military. You had to have some sort of military force that went out and became that instrument of power for that society. And so that's what organized violence is. And that's what the book kind of sets up into, well, there are these paradigms, these frames of how we look at war and how certain groups look at war, organized violence, differs from how others do.

Mike Jones (10:20)
Yeah, yeah.

Okay, that's really interesting. when you think about reconceptualizing war, how are sort of the lessons that you pulled out from there, how does that help us now think about how do we reconceptualize strategy?

Guest (10:52)
This is, think, the most important thing for listeners who are involved in military education or military leadership or policy or foreign affairs, any of these things that a lot of people spend a lot of time working on. And this book argues simply that almost all of us are guilty of one thing. And I was guilty of this for very, long time myself because I'm a product of the system. I'm a product of the American military system.

Mike Jones (11:17)
Yeah.

Guest (11:18)
And this cardinal sin is that we all adhere to a single social paradigm, a war paradigm. And that's the one that is entrenched in how we look at all conflict. And therefore, we interpret all these conflicts. And we'll talk about some of the current ones today. So we can talk about Hamas and Israel. Very currently, we can talk about Israel and Iran. We can talk about Russia and the Ukraine. We can talk about the Cold War.

Mike Jones (11:40)
yeah, yeah.

Guest (11:43)
between the United States and China. ⁓ So in all of these, the problem is that the Americans, the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians, they look at, say, Israel and Hamas, this conflict, and they look at it through one war paradigm, and it's what we call functionalism. it's through all of our doctrine. It's through everything, right? It's through our education.

Mike Jones (11:47)
Yeah, ⁓

Yeah, I was gonna say.

Guest (12:07)
challenge though is that Hamas uses a different war paradigm and I explain that in my book and I talk about these doomsday ideological groups and we use Anatole Rappaport's construct and he wrote about this in the 1960s in his introduction to Klauswitz's own war which the Clauswitzian defenders hate this because his introduction disrupted the single paradigm that Clausewitz is everything, right? And that's one of the

That's one of problems. If you talk with Westerners who are functionalists, they'll say, it's all Clausewitz and Jominy. Right? It's all Clausewitz and Jominy. And then, well, building upon that, all the other thinkers, Mahan, Corbett, Dohert, Boyd, they all build off of that. But when we go against someone or groups who aren't Clausewitzian, that aren't functionalists, such as Marxists. All right, so Marxists don't use Clausewitz the same way whatsoever.

Mike Jones (12:39)
Yeah, just

Guest (12:57)
And that's just one example. I'll pause there because I know you want to say something.

Mike Jones (13:00)
Yeah, yeah,

just thinking about, just for our listeners to understand about, functionalism. how would you describe that for our listeners?

Guest (13:07)
yet so let's let's just do the screen share figure three from the book in in this is again this is pure ⁓ gibson borel and gareth morgan so borel and morgan in nineteen seventies they they came up with a social paradigm theory and they were building off of when most

listeners hear the word paradigm they think of a scientific paradigm and that was the coined by thomas kuhn and his incredible groundbreaking book but kuhn was looking originally kuhn was looking at scientific paradigms and what he meant by this essentially was in a nutshell to compress his book until thirty seconds is that ⁓ scientific paradigm occupies how the world looks and approaches and does things scientifically until it doesn't work anymore

And then as it's breaking down, the defenders of the paradigm will just continue to do busy work to keep propping it up so that it just barely continues to function. But there's a couple of outliers who then say, hey, we need to bring in this entirely new scientific paradigm. And if they do successfully, it replaces and destroys the previous paradigm. And then all of society moves into the new scientific paradigm. So we saw this with Newtonian ⁓ thinking that replaced

non-scientific Western thinking, so that was a paradigm shift. And then we had it again at the beginning of the 20th century with general relativity and quantum. Those two together replaced and dislodged the Newtonian worldview. And the case in point is that if anybody looks up overhead at the heavens, over 100 kilometers up, we have low Earth orbit. And those things that are in orbit right now, such as the International Space Station,

Mike Jones (14:22)
Yeah.

Guest (14:48)
and all those satellites, if we were just still using Newtonian physics, none of that would be there. It wouldn't be able to be, because it would crash, it would explode. None of that would work. The only way that stuff is working is because our civilization was able to transcend out of the Newtonian scientific paradigm that was working for about four or five centuries. That was good enough, but it wasn't good enough to get us to this next level.

Mike Jones (14:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (15:16)
And so that's how Kuhn was talking about sensitive paradigms. In the 1970s, Borel and Morgan, as sociologists said, hey, we need to adapt this type of paradigm thinking and look at how different groups of human beings construct a social reality and they're different. Because if you go into a Cino Marxist society, such as China, and then you look at how they value things, how they have a belief system, how they...

believe that these very deep philosophical levels so ontology which we which is we know what is and is not real and then the other word is epistemology which is how we know how knowledge is conveyed and constructed how things go right on top ontology epistemology of a single Marxist society is fundamentally in a different paradigm then we have for say functionalist Westerners and that's

Mike Jones (15:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Guest (16:11)
In the lower left hand corner of this graphic is where we start with functionalism. And that's what I spend chapters three and four ⁓ explaining to the readers how really everything that we do from policy to strategy down to tactics. I don't talk too much about tactics because that's a misnomer. Bullets and bombs and ⁓ trench knives, they're all the same. But the difference is the person wielding them.

if they believe in a different social reality, now we're up at this philosophical level, but that will drive the whole purpose of the war, the conflict. It'll drive their strategy, it'll drive their strategic goals. And if these things are different, we're simply just fighting a war where we're shouting past each other while shooting at each other.

Mike Jones (16:53)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you see it when you talk about functionalism. Our institutions that we've created are supportive of that. We've created the structures that reinforce functionalism. And you see that a lot of people that have got to the position where they are aren't willing to let go of the structures and systems that have gotten there. So you pretty much reinforce them.

Guest (17:20)
Yeah, Yeah,

if we go back to just these first two slides here. So ⁓ the way that the Borel-Morgan framework works, and that's the quadrant that I adapt, and then I build upon it and I add to it, they talk about the objective to the subjective. And this creates kind of your framework, your first framework. So that's the horizontal ⁓ bar there, objective reality versus a subjective reality.

And then in figure two, and I do all this in the first two chapters, ⁓ we talk about conflict and order. And what we mean by that, what Borel and Morgan were originally saying is that this is what reality is. If it's an ordered reality, then you have a stable set worldview. Whereas if it's in conflict or change, that means that reality itself can transform over time. So when we move to this slide, slide three,

Mike Jones (17:53)
Yeah.

Guest (18:18)
The reason that functionalism is in the lower left corner at the intersection of an objective and ordered reality, the easiest thing for most readers that are probably familiar with the functionalist mindset, so Klauswitz, Jomini, all these different thinkers, Fuller, Littleheart, they'll all tell you the same thing, and that is that war has a changing character, but a

unchanging or enduring natural order. And so when you hear that statement, that is an ontological statement. It's saying that no matter what war, no matter what war you have, you can be talking about the Peloponnesian War, you can be talking about the emerging Iran-Iraq War that's happening right now. All the wars between them and every future war must obey this nature of war.

that is defined in different ways. Jominy, Clauswitz, and others. But to do that, ⁓ you're saying that war itself and how human beings experience war, it'll always fall within that certain order of nature, just as gravity is always going to exist ⁓ for human beings on the planet Earth. On a celestial body, you're always going have gravity. There's a certitude there, right?

Mike Jones (19:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Guest (19:40)
difference that's important for readers to grasp is that physics, right? So if we're talking about physics, we're talking about chemistry, we're talking about biology, all those things, yes, those have a certain order to them that extends beyond human beings. And the easy way to think about this philosophically is that did gravity exist before the first humans were able to think about gravity? Certainly. Absolutely. There's gravity that was around well before the dinosaurs, right? Gravity is an enduring constant nature.

Mike Jones (20:01)
Mm.

Guest (20:08)
But did war exist before humans could wage it? Did dinosaurs have war, right? And this is where there's a philosophical divide. And I write this book ⁓ advocating there's one of two positions. Either you say that war has always been there. And there's various ⁓ arguments on this. Some will say that it's just an enduring quality that was just there but not used. It was dormant.

Mike Jones (20:12)
No.

Guest (20:34)
⁓ which again there's certain ontological and epistemological choices there. And then others have made the argument that it's tied into our evolution. So it's an evolutionary argument that violence in a certain form has always been kind of part of the human condition and therefore it's inseparable from us, right? And that's more of an anthropological slash biological argument. But these are grounded still in functionalism because they're

Mike Jones (21:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (21:03)
Yeah, you're pairing war, a social construct, with these hard physics constructs, right? And that's what I tease out as, well, all these other social paradigms that are available here, so we radical structuralism, radical humanism, and interpretivism, these terms all came from Beryl and Morgan, but these are different paradigms where war can be understood quite differently, and then I lay out the examples of how

China today is a great example of radical structuralism, and they're an extension of the Soviet Union and Cuba and all these other communist experiments that are state-based systems. Radical humanism has postmodern and critical theory elements, which ⁓ links back to World War I ⁓ and some of the frustrations that Marxists had coming out of World War I, and this was the social Marxist movement.

that began in the 1920s and has manifested today where you ⁓ have ⁓ university activists ⁓ making a strange combination of say ⁓ Gays for Gaza, That's a bumper sticker. What you really have is you have Western ⁓ movements and groups that ⁓ associate

Mike Jones (22:13)
Yeah, yeah

Guest (22:24)
⁓ homosexual or gay, lesbian, ⁓ LBGT, all that. ⁓ They pair those constructs, which links back to critical race and critical gender theory. So these are critical theory constructs that date all the way back to two different planks, the Gramsci School ⁓ out of Italy and Marxist Italian thinking, and then the Frankfurt School, which really rose out of the ashes of German...

disillusionment in the interwar period with what happened with Russia. It was not supposed to be a Russian revolution. It was supposed to be a Marxist revolution in Berlin or London or Paris. And they were frustrated and dejected. And they said, well, we got to rethink Marx. These things develop into social Marxism. But this is also where you have ⁓ the gaze for Gaza. have social Marxists advocating with

Mike Jones (22:56)
Yeah.

Guest (23:18)
radical eschatological or radiological movements and that's where Hamas is. wouldn't work together, they would kill each other if they were left on the same battlefield but they have a common enemy in that they're trying to destroy the entire Western modern system. this is radical humanism and functionalism at war with Hamas really being an extension. They'd be further down, let's just advance here to chapter six.

just give me a minute, here we go, radical omnisom, which is an extension of radical structuralism. So I've got the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, we've got the ⁓ Shinriko from Japan, Hamas, Boko Haram, Branch Davidians. I try to hit a whole bunch of different groups, not just Islamic radical terror groups, although they are very useful example today. But these are strange bedfellows, but they all have certain ontological and epistemological alignments that allows

Mike Jones (24:04)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (24:12)
radical ominous to then play around with global cataclysmic groups here so we've got ⁓ different anarchists and radical extremist groups ⁓ and then they move into radical humanism this is in chapter seven cc your frankfurt school or time or door no mark who's all these different twentieth century thinkers that were reinterpreting marks after world war one

I know I just said a whole bunch of stuff here, so let's dive back. Where do you want to circle back to?

Mike Jones (24:42)
Well, just looking on this and thinking about, you said about China being radical structuralism, got West being functionalism, we're looking at strategy and how, I always look at it and go, well, the modern view of strategy.

is fundamentally broken because it predicates on three main theories that aren't true. The world's stable, linear cause relationship, and the world's predictable, which a lot of that sticks into functionalism. So what are the other paradigms that can help people sort of move from? Because I know in your book you adopt that it's not one, it's not one...

paradigm it's useful to understand all four paradigms and how you can use them.

Guest (25:30)
Great question. I'll jump into I talk about this in ⁓ the eighth chapter See and again, we have to kind of lay all the groundwork and the organization of the book is that in the the first two chapters I explain ⁓ how social paradigms work I explain the basics of Beryl and Morgan and then I introduce Anatole Rappaport and a lot of his ideas because those bring bring me into

explaining functionalism. And then I spend two entire chapters, chapters three and four, really hitting functionalism in every possible way. So I start with kind of the classics, right? We go into Napoleonic warfare. I talk about Klauswitz and Germany, and then I bring us through World War I. And then after the first atomic bombs are dropped, that's where I argue that functionalism

functionalism enters a new sort of phase if you will because nuclear weapons are different and it's important to really spend some time thinking about Because they're existential and so is artificial intelligence not to be a doomsday person But there's a lot of concern. I write a lot about The rise of artificial general intelligence and how this may be an arms race Where the the weapon itself is produced that can define its own new ends beyond the human designers, right? That's that's important

Mike Jones (26:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Guest (26:51)
But I also talk about fascism and I spend quite a bit of time in chapter 4 explaining fascism, which is a variation of functionalism. fits in there and it also then ties into when you hear Marxists and fascists and capitalists argue, there's a lot of name-calling, right? And a lot of shouting and screaming. The problem though is that when a lot of Westerners will accuse

Mike Jones (27:10)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Guest (27:19)
an adversary or an opponent ⁓ of being a Marxist. It's like, well, okay, when you use that word, what do you really mean? And a lot of times the person shouting past one another, they don't really know or they don't understand. so I explain the differences in radical structuralism, classical Marxism, that's later Marx after 1848, that's Marx and Engel, that's Lenin, that's ⁓ Stalin, course, Castro, all these different thinkers, and it links to Mao.

who then of course creates the conditions for a Z. Mao was pulling in Confucianism and Daoism and Chinese constructs that differed from Greco-Roman ones. So looking at say the Soviet Union and what Lenin was doing, you can't just copy and paste and say, oh no, now it's China today. That's wildly oversimplifies it.

Mike Jones (27:51)
Mm.

Guest (28:13)
The going back to the the the Marxist nuances here is that social Marxists are quite different and draw from different Marxist content stuff written before 1848. So this is before Engels really started working with Marx. And this is early Marx where he was drawing from different philosophical ideas and it was much more subjective. So it wasn't tied to the same economic levers of capitalism and

post capitalism and making these communist arguments it was different and that's where you see some of those nuanced differences today particularly with arguments against the West that are not grounded in say China or ⁓ Venezuela or any ⁓ Vietnam and again you gotta put an asterisk next to a lot of these because they're not really ⁓ communist societies not in the original sense they're modified they're

Mike Jones (29:05)
night.

Guest (29:08)
They're living in a capitalist world with capitalist applications and machinery, but they're still, rhetoric and their strategy and their philosophies are tied towards a different framework, an eschatological framework, right? So again, interpretivism though, I'm showing it in the graphic here, this is where I believe that we can take, and these graphics look very overwhelming for readers that haven't read the book. A lot of stuff here.

Mike Jones (29:20)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (29:35)
But by the time you get to the eighth chapter, all this will make sense because we've built it incrementally along the ways. But interpretivism ⁓ tries to look at the other paradigms and then work and bridge across them. And this is what I make the argument at the end of the book, chapters eight and then the conclusion, chapter nine, is that we can still live and operate in our favorite paradigm. So...

Mike Jones (29:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Mmm.

Guest (30:03)
If you're a Western functionalist, know, Jominy or Klauswitz or Corbett or Mahan or Littleheart or Fuller, if that's your grounding, if the Boydian Oodaloo is near and dear to your heart, you can still do that. But as an interpretivist, though, you recognize you say, number one, I acknowledge that there's multiple war paradigms and I use one of them. Number two, I know what my paradigm is.

Mike Jones (30:20)
Yeah.

Guest (30:31)
and I am insert your paradigm, right? So in this case, you're a functionalist. Okay. But I'm going to now use the interpretive paradigm as a bridging vehicle. And I'm going to look at my adversary. And in this case, maybe my adversaries Hamas. So if you're the Israelis, the Israelis are functionalist too. So they're going to look at Hamas or the Iranians and they'll say, all right, we are functionalists. They are not. What are they? So in the case of Hamas in Iran,

that they are variations of radical omnism. right, so if we go forward a few slides here. So this is what interpretivism does. It allows you to kind of bridge and move around. And this is the final slide. This is the one that really ties everything up. It's in the conclusion. Unfortunately,

So if we go down to here, we say this is functionalism, right? So let's say this is where the Israelis are today. Now there's a small amount of the Israeli Defense Force that are over here. And this is the design movement. And I talk about that in the eighth chapter. So the systemic operational design, which is still being taught at the Israeli ⁓ General's course in Tel Aviv today. Right now, Shimon Naveh...

Mike Jones (31:24)
Yeah.

Guest (31:42)
He was teaching there until recently. Now he is taking a sabbatical and is not with the school. So Dr. Ofra Grasher is the lead ⁓ SAAD facilitator. She's a very good friend ⁓ and she and I exchange a lot of emails. ⁓ The Israelis have a small element that's over here. What amount of SAAD is being used in the current Israeli campaigns against the Hamas and Iran, I do not know.

But I think that will be phenomenal content in the future that will probably be studied in great detail by military scholars. But most of Israel is here in functionalism. And we say, well, where are the Iranians? Where are the Iranians? Well, the Iranians are up here. This is radical omnism. And this is why when the Prime Minister of Israel is talking about how Iran has continued to say since the 1979 revolution,

Mike Jones (32:16)
Yeah.

Guest (32:36)
that they want to destroy Israel. is not destroy another state in a state system like functionalists say. It is a divine messianic eschatological decree. And Iran has shared that with many other radical groups. Branch Davidians being a great Christian example, right? So this is more American. Excuse me. This is more American. So those.

Mike Jones (32:44)
Yeah.

Guest (33:01)
outside of the United States might not be familiar with who the Branch Davidians are, but this was the infamous Waco standoff with the FBI. Yeah, remember that? Yeah, and ended in tragedy, but there are many other groups that work like this, and the Branch Davidians cannot be confused with white nationalist groups that I talk about in Chapter 4. They're still down here in functionalism, because fascism and functionalism

Mike Jones (33:04)
No, no, no.

⁓ yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Guest (33:28)
are kind of hand in hand. not saying that all functionals are fascists, I'm absolutely not saying that, but I am saying that if you're in the functionalist paradigm, this is where you're going to probably put your fascists as well. There are nuances, ⁓ but that's where they are. And so, say ⁓ the ⁓ Silent Brotherhood, which was a ⁓ fascist

Mike Jones (33:32)
Yeah

Guest (33:55)
white nationalist movement in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s in United States. I explain them as one example, ⁓ the Ku Klux Klan being another, but they work as functionalists, and so they work down here. The Branch Davidians were different. They were trying to bring upon a ⁓ end of the world, doomsday. So the Iranians, ⁓ at least their leadership and ⁓ those that are driving their decision-making.

work up in here do the same thing so do the Islamic State right and so does al-qaeda See that so does al-qaeda Iraq so does the Muslim Brotherhood is is different You notice that I start with them in 1928 up here, but they've migrated They've migrated and morphed into more of a quasi functionalist entity like They don't still share a lot of the constructs. They did through the 1950s and 60s

Mike Jones (34:38)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (34:52)
So I know that was that was Israel and Iran, but if we talk about, say, the United States and China, the United States being a largely functionalist. So that's the US here. But China is up here. China's radical structuralist. Right. This is where Marx, this is where Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gap, Che Guevara, Castro, the Weather Underground, all these different actors ⁓ advocating these constructs. Radical structuralism differs because that is the kind of classic

uh... marxist formula for how to bring about transformation of all social reality or workers the world unite they are different as marxist from social marxist right so these are your your advocates that are combining critical theory and postmodern concepts you've got an tifa uh... you've got followers of graham she frank for school the weather the weather underground oscillates here uh... intentionally explain that in a book

Mike Jones (35:40)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (35:47)
And then Antifa leapfrogs all over the place because original anti-fascists in the 1920s through the 40s were very, very different from the anti-fascists or Antifa of today. ⁓ Antifa today involved in some of the American ⁓ issues that are going on, protests and different things. But ⁓ the book Reconceptualize Your War reconceptualizes all these things because

If we don't look at it this way, we default into thinking about single paradigms. We go back to ⁓ this. We go back to, okay, I'm a radical structuralist and you're looking at it through interpretivism. We're fighting over all this. We are shouting past each other and we're disregarding how we look at the world differently. And we're just doing tactical and operational fighting on battlefields. But we don't understand our different.

strategies or different beliefs, right? And here's another one. So this is functionalism versus interpretivism. This is a tension between the traditional doctrinal military majority for the West and what I frame as the design movement, ⁓ the innovators, those that are utilizing complexity theory. Interpretivism ⁓ differs, but together you can use two or more paradigms.

Mike Jones (36:44)
yeah yeah yeah

Guest (37:11)
and gain benefits that you could not possibly achieve with just one paradigm.

Mike Jones (37:16)
So how would would interpretism and functionalism how would that you know you talk about complexity theory and this is what we advocate a lot on here around looking at complexity theory and how that can help. How do you see that helps people now in the modern day to understand and adapt in this in this sort of volatile world?

Guest (37:39)
Okay, great. Yeah, I love that question because it ties right into this graphic on figure 29. And this is in Chapter 8, where I explain how interpretism works ⁓ with all the different paradigms, all three. ⁓ So we take this graphic, we see on the left is functionalism and reality is a stable system. This is where ⁓ war has an unchanging nature, right? But it's got a changing character that depending on the

the context, the geography, the technology, the belief systems, the different things that are socially constructed, your war's character can be different, but there's still these fundamental absolutes that govern ⁓ all wars, and those use, again, very, very objective Newtonian constructs like centers of gravity, principles of war, elements of operational art, which all are physics-based, right? Mass, maneuvers, speed.

Mike Jones (38:34)
Mm.

Guest (38:36)
So again, we see this and part of that is because why is the modern functionalist military profession has hammered itself into a hard science, so to speak, or as Christopher Paparon, I love citing him, a pseudo-science. ⁓ And that's because after ⁓ Napoleon kind of ran through Europe and shattered ⁓ the earlier ⁓ beliefs about how war was properly waged, ⁓

Mike Jones (38:52)
Yeah

Guest (39:04)
militaries tried to professionalize and so they look to ⁓ the movements of biology, chemistry, ⁓ know, physics, ⁓ engineering, and they modeled themselves off of that all the way down to the metaphors. So centers of gravity are great example. You know, if you go to a physics lab and if you talk about, ⁓ you know, there's, for example, there's a company called Firefly. ⁓ They just put a

something on the moon and they've got a great mission that's coming up. This is just a commercial company, but again, think about it. ⁓ We have commercial companies that are going to put things on other celestial bodies. It's just so exciting. It's so amazing. ⁓ But for them, if you ask their engineers and their scientists, hey, can you explain to me lunar gravitational ⁓ pull and orbits and geometry and all these things, right? They'll fill the whiteboards.

Mike Jones (39:32)
Yeah.

Guest (39:58)
with mathematical formulas that are testable, provable, and validated, right? And that's why they can put something on the lunar surface. Then you go and you look at what's in our military doctrine, whether it's British, or Australian, Canadian, doesn't matter, they're all the same. And we look at our centers of gravity, there's none of that, right? It's just the metaphoric device that we stole because we wanted to sound more scientific.

Mike Jones (40:23)
Hmm.

Guest (40:23)
So

that that's part of that professionalization. So if we look on the on this slide here Functionalism we like to reduce things down break it down right? at PMSI PT politics economics information all these different things military ⁓ We use a modern construct versus a postmodern and I know when you say postmodernism a lot of folks will run in the opposite direction screaming

Mike Jones (40:32)
Yeah.

Guest (40:49)
But not all postmodernism is quote unquote bad. ⁓ Critical theorists will use it ⁓ in ways that are very disruptive and they're doing it intentionally. That's why they do it. But postmodernism has a lot of healthy elements that help us think about modernism in new and different ways. The Matrix movies, a great example. It's all based on a postmodern book by Baldrida. All the actors, ⁓ Keanu Reeves had to read

simulacra and simulation is before the the directors let him act ⁓ and it was a postmodern book. Yeah. Yeah, it's and again, ⁓ lots of good things. I enjoy a lot of postmodern ideas because it makes me think about modernism in different ways. ⁓ Functionalism has ⁓ a reversible time. And what I mean by that is ⁓ this actually is in my my new book that's going to come out in the spring. I was a one of my jobs.

Mike Jones (41:21)
Well I didn't know that. Yeah that's cool.

Mm.

Guest (41:45)
in the army I was a national training center opposing forces commander and those are the bad guys so in these big giant training exercises you have the good forces right and they're trying to get at training objectives and do things ⁓ and then you have to have bad guys and the bad guys are supposed to do things and look like the real enemy that you're preparing to fight against ⁓

Mike Jones (41:50)
Yeah.

Guest (42:11)
And so when I was ⁓ directing opposing forces for some time at the Joint Reunites Training Center in Louisiana, we would have to do different exercises, different lanes, and then we had this free play, the big fights, right? Where we had a lot more that we could do. But each time that the training force, the blue force, you the good guys, the ones that were going to Iraq and Afghanistan, they needed to get this training right. Like they had to figure out how to deal with

V beds or IEDs or suicide bombers. They had to get it right. if my bad guys, if they got into a village and blew stuff up and just wrecked the place, the training center would then re-cock the exercise. They would reset it. We would go back in time and everyone would say, out, time out. They would teach the unit what they did wrong. And then the unit would then reset and get a second chance to do it correctly.

Mike Jones (42:43)
Yeah.

⁓ here we go.

Guest (43:06)
This would happen in various training lanes, ⁓ live fire exercises, and in free play in the box as well. And so the military looks at ⁓ time as a functionalist as reversible. You can go back, you can go forward, you can freeze it, you can do all these different things. Whereas interpretivism looks at time as irreversible. this is complexity science, right? So no matter what you do, no matter what we say and do, our changes have a...

Mike Jones (43:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Guest (43:33)
unstoppable, transformative ⁓ effect. And you cannot go back. You cannot go back. ⁓

Mike Jones (43:38)
Yeah, no.

And I think that's where a lot of people struggle, especially when we talk about path dependence and stuff like, know, decisions we make now, how they then will constrain or even create opportunities in the future. But as soon as you act, you are changing something. And by that nature of the change, you can't just turn it back. You've got to understand what constraints that's now brought to us, rather than thinking that you could just...

go back in time and it will be perfect.

Guest (44:07)
Right, right, yeah absolutely. And if we think about say relationships, so your significant other, or if you're a parent, your children. And here's a great example, like how many times if you're a parent have you had a child when they're older, say you know they're a teenager, and they'll remark to you, you know, mom or dad or whoever.

I remember you doing this one thing and they bring up something that you don't even remember and you must have said it years ago. But your kid remembers and it was important. They still remember it today. And that's the crazy thing is all the things you hope that they would remember, they don't. And then all the things that they do remember, it's like, what? You remember that? Why? I'll always remember when you did that. I get that a lot from my kids.

Mike Jones (44:41)
Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, yeah, same.

Guest (44:58)
You know, that reinforces

to me that it's that's that irreversible thing that like each each experience that we do, it's unique, it's custom, it's contextual. It's there's a lot of subjectivity. And that goes to that bottom bar there. Objective reality versus perspectival reality ⁓ in one. If you figured out the proper formula on how to perfectly raise a child, you could stamp it and reproduce it and mass produce it. And then everybody.

could have perfect children and perspective reality was like, no, that'll never work. It'll never, ever, ever work. And even if you built something that was the perfect formula, you doing it has now changed the system. A dynamic system will adapt to it and there'll be something that will change. Yeah.

Mike Jones (45:40)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this is key for lot of people working in strategy now is about context is key. Just because something worked in one context doesn't mean it's gonna work in another.

looking at different perspectives across the, even the organisation, even though we're all in the same organisation, I can objectively look at it go, well, this is what we do. Then that perspective may not be shared across the organisation because they're seeing something slightly different. And it doesn't mean it's wrong compared to me. It just means it's different from their perspective. And I need to be curious to understand what that is.

Guest (46:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Right, I mean, a great example is in our military doctrine. And again, I'm a recovering planner myself. ⁓ I always get a laugh out of that when I teach at a war college. ⁓ But if we look at different doctrines, this is a great example here, was if you're inside, and this is Miles' Law, right? Where you stand depends on where you sit. And that fun little slogan is really a powerful one, right? So if you're, say, ⁓ United States Army,

and say you're at Carlisle at the Army War College, objective reality, it's known that there are operational and strategic centers of gravity, usually two, there's a friendly and an enemy one, but there aren't tactical centers of gravity. Those are not real. Those are made up. They're false. Right? But if you head down a few hours and you drive down to Quantico, Virginia to where the Marine Corps has their War College, right, much smaller.

Mike Jones (47:00)
Hmm.

Guest (47:15)
only about 35 people. But the Marines are learning about tactical centers of gravity because in Marine Corps doctrine they do believe that there are tactical centers of gravity whereas the Army says no there are just the the manifestations and the constructs that ⁓ underpin your operational center of gravity but there's no tactical center of gravity right so it's like who's right who's wrong and that's the wrong question. The question isn't who's right and who's wrong the question is

Mike Jones (47:41)
Yeah.

Guest (47:44)
how do we appreciate both of these ⁓ different views? I say, interpretivism is one of the ways. And another great slide ⁓ or slide I have somewhere in one of my briefing decks is ⁓ each of the principles of war by different countries around the world, the French, the Americans, the Brits, the Chinese, the Soviet Union. It's an older slide, so it's got the Soviet Union there, so it's got to be pre-91. ⁓

Mike Jones (47:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (48:13)
pre-94. thing is when you look at this and you look at all these different ⁓ principles of war, remember those are the things that were supposed to be enduring ⁓ part of war's nature, right? It doesn't change. Well wait a minute, how can we have these this variation in epistemology across all these different nations? The wrong question is who's right, who's wrong, because that again reinforces single paradigm thinking. I'm right,

Mike Jones (48:25)
Mmm.

Guest (48:41)
Everyone else is wrong. I don't care what you think. I'm going to beat you at war. Okay. That's what we've been doing up until now. The better question is why is it that we have so much diversity of thinking at the ontological epistemological levels? And that leads us to this. That leads us to looking at say slide 35 here. We've got different paradigms. We've got shifts of concepts. You know, so even Klauswitz, you know, Klauswitz went from an earlier state.

Mike Jones (48:46)
Yeah.

Guest (49:10)
through 1827, a few years before his untimely death. But he was an idealist at that point. All of his writings, for the bulk of Klaus Witts' life ⁓ as a writer, as a military thinker, he went through a huge epistemological shift and became a realist in just the last two or three years of his life, where he was rewriting on war, and really only got through ⁓ two and a half chapters of rewrites.

and then died. So even with Klauswitz, you when we talk about one of the military popes of ⁓ functionalism, there's that shift that occurs. And so there was also one with complexity science. know, there's a shift when it first went, know, complexity science from 1950s into the 1980s, but then there was a significant shift that occurred that moves it more into interpretivism. And then I talked earlier about the Marxist shift.

Mike Jones (49:39)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Guest (50:06)
You had early Marx, 1837 to 1845-ish, and then he bounces over with Engel's help into radical structuralism. But the radical humanists really didn't start gaining traction until after World War I. So all this is kind of backwards chronologically, because most people, when you hear the word Marxist, you think a large state-type system that's in conflict with the idea of the state.

Mike Jones (50:33)
Yeah.

Guest (50:34)
But in it itself has to be a state or look like a state ⁓ to continue the ⁓ Marxist aspirations towards ⁓ normatively changing reality towards a communist utopia that's global. But that's later Marx. That's later Marx that ⁓ was manifested in the Lenin revolution. So you have the Bolshevik revolution, but the Bolshevik revolution

became a point of failure for those Marxists that were eagerly awaiting ⁓ that revolution, the proletariat to overthrow Berlin, to overthrow London, to overthrow Paris. That's what was supposed to happen in a highly industrialized nation state with clear ⁓ urban-based ⁓ worker class. And it didn't happen. And so that's why radical humanism drew from early Marx to reinterpret to

work off of those failures and say, hey, Lenin and them, they got marks wrong. They got marks wrong. Here's how it's supposed to work. And that's why World War I was so important in terms of it built out all these different social paradigms because World War I mostly started with just functionalist states. And then you had ⁓ a ⁓ radical structuralist revolution occur by a small group of intellectuals within Russia.

Mike Jones (51:34)
You

Guest (51:57)
And they were present in Germany, you had in the interwar period certainly, had battles between fascists and Marxists. But this is kind of what happened in the 20th century, and this is where we are today.

Mike Jones (51:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I like your point about not asking who's wrong. It's about understanding the different perspectives and where they got that from. Especially when you're around how organizations construct themselves now to think there is just a way that we do things. And it must be done in the sequence because that's what we've always done and that's how we have to structure ourselves.

rather than thinking about different perspective, how you can do things and challenging actually the necessity for a lot of the structures they put in place. Are they needed and is there other ways that we can do this and how are we coupled with the external environment and is our perspective that we're using, are we challenging our perspective?

Guest (53:02)
Right, right. And again, Reconceptualizing War is a book. I do not advocate ⁓ for war. ⁓ I acknowledge that war, organized violence, it's something that's a characteristic that human beings, our species, have done since we've organized into societies. And there's no halt on how we...

⁓ creatively come up with new ways of waging conflict, right? There's lots of different ways that we do it. It's part of how our species is and it's kind of one of the uglier, more brutal aspects of what it is to be human versus not being a human. But going back to your point is that ⁓ I'm also not advocating that

Mike Jones (53:44)
Mm.

Guest (53:51)
someone who works at a war college, should abandon Klauswitz and they should ignore Jominy that Machiavelli is wrong. That's absolutely not what we're saying here. But what we are saying is if you adhere to a single paradigm and everything that you ⁓ construct and think about for conflict is tied to one paradigm and denying the others and just saying, is Marx, but Marx still obeys Klauswitz.

Right? So Lenin still had to use Klauswitz and today President Xi must still use Klauswitz and Jomany. Okay. That's part of the problem is that if you're a functionalist and you use Reconceptualizing War, this book, well then you can still be a functionalist, but you can then use interpretivism to gain a broader view to better understand, say, Sinno-Marxism so that we can come up with better strategies of understanding and appreciating how to defeat China.

from say the American perspective. At the same time, the Chinese, if they wanted to, again, this book is its philosophy. So I can't control this. I don't want it to happen. ⁓ if the Chinese wanted to take the reconceptualizing war concepts and figure out how to be better at forming their strategies for radical structuralists to defeat functionalists, well, they could. And sadly, I think in any conflict,

Mike Jones (54:49)
Yes, yeah.

Guest (55:16)
whether we're talking about Russia and the Ukraine, ⁓ Israel and Iran, Israel and Hamas, or Western societies dealing with internal strife, and this is where we have the social Marxist movements, right? And this is where we are frustrated with not really understanding how much protest and violence is freedom of expression in a democratic society, in a plural society.

But then when does it become something else where the nation state using say functionalism doesn't even realize that it is at war with a social Marxist movement? And that's I know a very, very spicy thing to say. And I'll just leave it at that and say chapter seven is all about that because if you are say a radical humanist and you are waging war against the United States, against Great Britain.

Mike Jones (55:47)
Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

Guest (56:13)
against france ⁓ a lot of things you see in the newspapers they is exactly what some of them are trying to do and part of how they're able to do this so effectively is because the confusion in the obfuscation of these acts of organized violence make them appear to be something else and the deception goes back to some zoo which is that all of warfarin's deception right and that's that's a very interesting thing because

Mike Jones (56:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Guest (56:40)
Sun Tzu and Klauswitz don't really work well together or Jomini because Sun Tzu wasn't a functionalist. But yeah, this is where you can use these things to look at these different ⁓ war paradigms. And then once again, if you're a functionalist, be a functionalist, but be more than just a functionalist. If you're a radical structuralist, go, you know, be one, but know yourself, know others, and then think.

Mike Jones (56:47)
No.

Yeah, yeah.

Guest (57:07)
more creatively than your adversary. And I believe the areas of innovation and creative thinking and critical thinking requires a multi-paradigmic view. If we don't have this, we are at a handicap. And if our adversary has this, they have the advantage, no matter what.

Mike Jones (57:21)
Yes.

Guest (57:27)
That's kind of my thesis.

Mike Jones (57:27)
Yeah, yeah. And

yeah, and that comes ⁓ through in the book really well. And you're right, he's not saying that one is one is better than the other or it's about how can we utilise the different perspectives. And you see this a lot with in Monoshti around. I see it lot where, you know, it's very functionalist. It's just the aspiration first, very stable. And we can achieve that rather than actually stopping to really understand what is being produced by

the organisation we're in, what's actually happening outside, what's the perspective of our suppliers or our competitors or our collaborators and stopping to understand these different perspectives to come up with that will actually potentially have more weight and more that will actually work in this environment rather than just thinking if we just do the same old thing again and again.

that it will work and also get fall into that trap of just denying other perspectives thinking that any perspective beyond ours is wrong where actually the only perspective that is wrong is denying someone else's and actually we can learn a lot if we just pause and you see this a lot with modern

Guest (58:29)
Right.

Mike Jones (58:43)
media and stuff like that. get people that are completely opposite polar ends of the spectrum and they just shout at each other. There's no one really there to, like you say, take the interpreter's role and sit there and actually listen to understand what they're saying and actually realizing where are the commonalities that we have and what are the differences and why are these differences coming around.

Guest (59:06)
Right, right.

Yeah, yeah. Your point on technology and information and the speed which things happen, you know, we have probably three buckets of listeners right now, right? And some will say, yep, that's me when I mention these three buckets, right? So the modern, ⁓ those people born and don't know what a blockbuster video card is or video rental card, right?

Mike Jones (59:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Guest (59:35)
That's

one bucket and those are younger listeners in the up and coming. And for them, they've had this amazing reality of smart technology and instant information and it's so different. ⁓ If you were ever ⁓ using a dial-up phone to call your video store to tell them that you're late on returning your VCR tape, you're in the second category.

Mike Jones (59:59)
You

Guest (1:00:02)
And that's my generation, probably yours as well. Right? And so if we think back to when we were younger, information and these processes moved. We still had plenty of wars. We had lots of technology. But things moved slower and things were not as dynamic and complex as they are today in terms of just how fast things can go viral and how fast misinformation, disinformation can hit millions of people.

Mike Jones (1:00:02)
me. I mean it.

Guest (1:00:28)
The third bucket though, we gotta go old school, is there's a whole generation of people that if you wanted to watch something on television, well you better get there and look at the TV guide and sit down and turn it on and there it is. And once it's over, it's over, right? And that's the generation just before us, they didn't have VCRs, the technology was different. But the media, the media back then was different as well.

Mike Jones (1:00:45)
Yeah, yeah

Guest (1:00:56)
There was a defining moment for the American Vietnam War ⁓ in 1968-69 period, I think 68, where Walter Cronkite, after the Tet Offensive, looked to the camera and said essentially, I don't believe we're going to win this war. yeah, and when historians look back at that, that's when policymakers and military senior leaders realized they had lost the American public.

Mike Jones (1:01:15)
Yeah, I remember that.

Guest (1:01:25)
And that was in a period where if a media figurehead, if Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather looked at the screen and told you something, you'd doxgarn believed it, right? But now look at these three buckets. You have the older bucket and how things were much slower, very traditional. You've got our bucket, you and I, where we were the Gen X type. ⁓

Mike Jones (1:01:39)
Mm.

Guest (1:01:54)
growing into this technology. And then you've got the latest generation where ⁓ someone on TikTok or a social media influencer has more power than ⁓ whoever's on ABC News or whatever author is writing in the London Times or the New York Times, right? So we live in a much more dynamic complex reality.

Mike Jones (1:02:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Guest (1:02:18)
coupled with all the existential threats that we've collected along the way. So we've got nuclear, we've got chemical, we've got biological, and now we're bringing in artificial intelligence and quantum, and we're expanding into the space domain. And there's all these things that are happening that are amazing, but there's a lot of existential elements to it. And so conflict is wrapped up in all of these things. So it's a very, very different world that we're in. And this is where we need

Mike Jones (1:02:41)
Yeah.

Guest (1:02:45)
an understanding of multiple war paradigms. must do this. We cannot continue to do things the old way or we will... Here's what we will do. And there's a pattern of this with the United States at least. We're very good tactically and we're pretty darn good operationally. So we can win on the battlefield easily, but we don't win our wars anymore. We kind of grind to a stalemate.

Mike Jones (1:02:53)
Yeah.

No.

Guest (1:03:13)
And then we lose interest and leave. Yeah, and that's the problem.

Mike Jones (1:03:14)
yeah yeah and again the yeah

and that really brings back the essence of you know why i established this podcast is really challenging around um the traditional orthodoxy around strategy and actually how can we take a different perspective or utilize other perspectives to ensure that our strategy can actually meet reality so we don't go into this stalemate like they are but it's been um

It's been absolutely fascinating talking to you about this. What would you like to leave listeners to think about from the podcast?

Guest (1:03:51)
Well, you know, if you've stuck with us this long, appreciate it. And clearly, you know, if you've hung on and you've in your all at the if you're at this point of the podcast, you're clearly a deep thinker and you're very interested in more beyond the superficial because, you know, anybody can enjoy watching the tactics of conflict. They're exciting. People play video games. You know, my kids are always playing Call of Duty.

Mike Jones (1:03:55)
Yeah

Guest (1:04:18)
And you look at that, go, all right, that is a simulation of the tactics, and a lot of it's wildly inaccurate. the tactics themselves are a misnomer because the bullets, I said there's the bullets, the bombs, the protest signs, all those things are things that happen at a certain level. But if we neglect and fail to understand, number one, what is my paradigm?

Mike Jones (1:04:18)
Yeah, yeah, same. ⁓

Mm.

Guest (1:04:44)
Everyone has to point that at them. What is my paradigm? And for people that cop out of that and will say, well, I don't really believe in the social paradigms or, or, you know, I looked at the social paradigm theory and I just don't see any of those that really construct what I believe. So I'm different, right? That is an intellectual cop out. That is intellectual laziness because that is a person or people who don't even want to have the discussion.

Mike Jones (1:05:01)
Okay.

Guest (1:05:10)
because they're unwilling to risk saying, this is my box. We all have boxes. Everyone works within a social paradigm. Now, which one you're in is up to you, but that's the first step. The second step is recognizing there are different paradigms out there and then recognizing that our adversaries, might work inside of our paradigm and that's relatively useful, right? I think the Ukraine-Russia conflict is much more like that.

It's mostly functionalist versus functionalist, right? ⁓ So there's not a whole lot of philosophical inquiry you can do if they're like-minded, but at the same time, yes, there is in that you can look and take a multi-paradamic view. And so if you want, say, the Ukrainians to prevail, well, are there advantages in the other paradigms, interpretivism, radical structures, and radical humanism, that if the Ukrainian strategy adapted those,

Mike Jones (1:05:36)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Guest (1:06:03)
could they exploit a vulnerability that the Russian functionalists are currently using and unaware of? That's how you do it at that high philosophical level. Then those policymakers, those strategists, those senior leaders, those military leaders that are commanding large organizations and are chartered with organizational change and innovation and creativity, they can then create new strategies that

Mike Jones (1:06:10)
Hmm.

Guest (1:06:28)
lead to operations that lead to tactics and you can have different outcomes, right? That's the so what. However, none of this will work if we continue to just say,

Mike Jones (1:06:31)
Mm.

Guest (1:06:38)
This is my paradigm and yours is stupid. Yours is wrong. And I don't care. I had that conversation once with a senior Intel analyst in Afghanistan and he said essentially, I don't care what the Taliban think. This is their enemy's strategic center of gravity whether they know it or not and that's it and that's final. And I was like, okay.

Mike Jones (1:06:40)
Yeah,

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And that was it. You know, I was I was out in Iraq and Afghanistan like yourself. And, know, I could see it from where we were on the battlefield that we're trying to operate in a paradigm that was different to theirs, but not adapting. And we just thought that we could just carry on the way we are. We couldn't adapt quick enough because we weren't willing to to recognize them serve, I suppose, in your term now.

Guest (1:07:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (1:07:21)
willing to own our paradigm but then see it from different perspective.

Guest (1:07:24)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, the differences between Al-Qaeda and Taliban are significant. They were using different paradigms, right? You know, the Taliban are mostly falling into, right now at least, the functionalist paradigm. They're just on the border. They're over a radical amnism just enough with what they're doing with lot of the Islamic Sharia law type stuff. But the Taliban differ from Al-Qaeda.

Mike Jones (1:07:30)
Yeah. Yeah.

Guest (1:07:49)
We kind of lumped them in together and we fought them using a purely functionalist construct that the coalition utilized and it hasn't changed. have now we've changed technology and we've changed tactics. We're using more drones. We're doing more EW. We're doing more atmospheric. We're doing more space. We're doing more cyber. We did all this great stuff today. We haven't changed our strategies. We haven't changed our doctrines and we're not going to change our war paradigm.

Mike Jones (1:08:13)
No.

Guest (1:08:17)
because we don't want to and that's that's a huge disadvantage I think going into the next series of conflicts if we have them particularly with the increased volatility we have of these new existential threats and I say that you know as artificial intelligence and existential threat I say yes and yes and I don't I don't say yes and no I yes and because it is with the potential but

Mike Jones (1:08:34)
Mm.

Guest (1:08:39)
The and part is important because if we do things right, advanced strong AI is going to transform the world in many positive ways. Many, many positive ways if we do it right. If we're careless, if we're reckless, if we're trapped in single paradigms, I don't know.

Mike Jones (1:08:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, it's great to think and I urge listeners to, you know, to pick up Ben's book because I think this is really important and you bring out the highlight, the issue around that strategic level. And that's what we're trying to advocate here as well. Actually, let's look at a different perspective, different paradigm of how we can utilize this to create better strategies, different strategies that would enable us to be successful, be it.

whatever your preference is, for profit, for good, for collaboration, there's difference there rather than just the traditional winning aspiration and structuralism of just focus on capabilities and et cetera. But it's been great to have you on, Ben.

Guest (1:09:37)
great to talk with you as a fellow veteran and wrestling with these strategic issues. there's, it's a small community of people that are worried about things at this level. But I applaud your work and thank you for having me on.

Mike Jones (1:09:46)
Mm.

Oh no, it's a pleasure, absolutely a pleasure, mate. And I look forward to speak to you again soon. I'll link Ben's book to the show notes. And if you like the episode, please share to your wider audience and like it and subscribe and support the channel. But thank you, Ben. I'll speak to you soon.

Guest (1:10:07)
All right,