Ask a Pakistani why Afghanistan matters

If you want to know, ask somebody: (ht: smallwarsjournal)

Afghanistan: Seven Fundamental Questions by Major Mehar Omar Khan

I know we live in a world that is real and is moved by minds – thinking, manipulating, conniving, conspiring, calculating and masquerading minds. Our world therefore seldom has a place for ‘sentiments’ – pure, sincere, honest and spontaneous as sentiments are. But when it comes to war in Afghanistan, I am not deterred by the tyranny of the trend. I like, in fact I am forced, to think through my heart. What else can you do when you see images of your countrymen; innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children; ripped apart by other human beings exploding in their midst almost on a daily basis? How can I not worry about my daughter when I see a pale and empty face of a mother in Kabul or Peshawar, bent like a broken branch of an old, dried up tree; over the dead body of her child? How can I not cry when the soul of my nation is hit and hurt by violence that is so inextricably linked with bloodshed beyond the snaky Khyber Pass? For us in Pakistan, the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan and astride Durand Line is the most seminal endeavor of our history. If this war is won, the entire world stands to benefit. But if it is lost, one country that will be hurt the most is Pakistan – my daughter’s home and her future. War astride the Durand Line is therefore so personal to so many of us.

This war is also extremely personal for thousands of American mothers who await and pray for the safe return of their sons and daughters: bright young men and women who deserve to live and who must never be wasted just because someone considers it politically expedient to continue to muddle along and because setting the course right needs some statesmanship and may also involve some political cost.

Major Mehar Omar Khan, Pakistan Army, is currently a student at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He has served as a peacekeeper in Sierra Leone, a Brigade GSO-III, an instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, and as Chief of Staff (Brigade Major) of an infantry brigade. He has also completed the Command and Staff Course at Pakistan’s Command and Staff College in Quetta.

Management games for deep insight

Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) describes the use of models to help us frame questions to ask of the world, and which help us become explicit about our world views, assumptions, frames of reference, theories of cause and effect, values, and desired outcomes.

Checkland, P. (2006) Learning for action: A short definitive account of soft systems methodology and its use for practitioners, teachers and students.  Chichester, England, Oxford Press

 We’ve developed a deceptively simple Force Mgt practical exercise in the form of a card game. The complete rule set is simple; takes 5 min to scan and understand. 

Rapid rule summary:

1. Students buy forces (5 cards) from a production table (a limited deck) and in each of 5 rounds,  deploy them into 5 regions to compete for Victory Points

2. Win:  first one to 51 victory points OR most points after 5 rounds

3. Game: lasts up to 5 rounds

4. Each round has 5 hands , each hand is worth Victory Points (VP)

5. Hand 1 is worth 6 VP, hand 2 is worth 5 VP etc…

6. Player 1 buys from the red deck, player 2 from the blue deck)

7. After you buy your 5 cards, you place 1 card face down in each region (hand)

8. Once all cards are placed,  cards are flipped over and you determine results

9. If your card wins the hand you get the victory points and keep you card; if you lose the hand, you get no victory points and lose your card. If it’s a tie, you keep your card and no one gets points.

10. Each player has an identical deck to buy from.

 It turns out that the development of strategy and then fielding an appropriate force really matters, AND there are distinct choices that are meaningful, available and feasible.

If you are interested, we’d like you to review the rules, and :

• 1. Buy your first round of forces
• 2. Deploy them into the 5 regions for turn 1.
• 3. Send your “Round 1” move to long-kenneth@conus.army.mil, along with a short description of your strategy

 We are interested in examining the variety of forces and the strategy employed in round 1.  Do you, for example:

1. Buy 4 ea 10s and a Joker to kill any enemy aces and retain max budget  flexibility to see what he has remaining?

2. Buy aces early to get a lead on victory points and then protect them?

3. Buy Jacks to kill 10s while still preserving SOME budgetary flexibility?

4. How do you balance economy of force with winning victory points? (efficiency vs effectiveness)

5. Variations?

 And then tactically employing forces, do you:

1. Put aces against 6 and 5 victory point regions?

2. Put 10s against 6 and 5s to hunt aces?

3. Aim for maximum victory points each round?

4. Aim to capture 11 of the 20 available points each round? (ie bluff on 6 and 3, but try to win 5,4,2?)

 In the actual play of the game we’ll look for adaptability and learning, and how strategies change after teams have played each other a couple times etc. 

We’ve play tested it enough to know there is a rich source of insights available in the game and that it is simple to play. We’ll  play it with decks of cards in the classroom 

We prototyped the game in our Force Management elective and are satisfied that that we generate student interest and insight into broader questions of Army force management in an interesting way.

 Here are some student insights gleaned from our playtesting:

1.  Round 1 results dominate the rest of your strategic choices, so getting Round 1 is crucial.

2.  Round 1 strategies are dominated by uncertainty because you have no information about your opponent’s strategy or adaptive style yet.

3. You have to decide when you want to buy strength: early and aim for quick wins, or later after you have seen pieces of the opponents forces and strategy.

4. Forecasting your opponents moves is problematic and make this more like poker than chess or bridge.

5. Aces are like the FCS: dominating until low-cost alternatives found the weakness. It wasn’t unit Aces were developed that the 10s became meaningful, so be alert to deep flaws in complex technologies.

6. Kings are costly but dominate the field; An opponent with Kings drives you to buy Aces but make you vulnerable to 10s.

6. Jacks (J) are a low cost success strategy against 10s, but can be incrementally be defeated by other mid-weight forces.

8. The costs of transforming cards between rounds is significant but manageable and may lead to strategic advantage. Scenario: You buy Aces on the first round and are successful, opponent buys 10s to kill your aces in the second round, but you trade down to Kings which dominate, and which remain difficult to defeat in subsequent rounds.

9. Deciding where (in what regions) to selectively deploy strength

10. Tactical results can overcome strategic insights and strategic failures. Tacrtics can be game changing.

11. What if the enemy has different victory conditions? Price points? Has different rules?

12. What if new cards are introduced after the first rule set is established?

13. How much would you pay to see the opponents’ hands?

14. What if there are partial wins? Or more than 2 teams playing?

15. Simple games can be powerful learning strategies

 Conclusions: the game serves as a way to dramatize very clearly many of our force management challenges and is a useful way to create rapid, deep awareness of prime issues in this domain.

 Here are some insights from a dedicated gamer and management game modeler:

I suspect that for most people’s first play they are strongly influenced by a form of Confirmation Bias: the As are priced higher, therefore new players conduct their analysis from the assumption that As are more valuable. Depending on the goals of your concrete experience, that may be the best argument for keeping the current price structure. However, an ace of spades loses to seven cards, including four cheap ones, where a KH loses to only four cards that are both expensive and vulnerable — the KH is easily the strongest card in the deck.

I assume trade-ins are secret — in fact that for all practical purposes players are operating behind a screen during their setup phase — because knowing whether your opponent has made any trade-ins is very valuable information. You may want to specify that in the rules.

 Given the prevalence of 10s in everyone’s first turn strategies, it seems like the second-cheapest strategy is far more optimal than the cheapest — that is four tens and a jack of spades. That marginal $15 gives you a pretty good shot at a victory somewhere, and a decent chance of carrying more net capital forward.

 Here are a selection of previously submitted moves for  Round 1: (* = Joker)

Strategy 1
Region	Cards	Strategy:                  Cost:  102   Carry forward: 48
6	10h	I’m trying to kill aces while creating and deploying one, but putting it where it is unlikely to run into an ace-killer unless the other guys is trying an ace-killer strategy like mine.  I’ve got cheap on the ace I bought, which is a risk that may not be worthwhile. I’m expecting to kill an ace in either 6 or 5, win 4 outright, and lose in 3 and 2.  Expected results are thus 9.5 points to me, 10.5 points to the bad guys, I will lose approx $35 worth of cards and kill approx $70 worth.  The enemy is expected to have spent rather more than me, so I will have more cash with which to restructure in light of what I find out. Cost: 102
5	10c
4	As
3	10d
2	10s
Strategy 2
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  150   Carry forward: 0
6	10s	10 is the ace killer on 6, then we try to overpower each successive category on the way down.  Assumes aces go to 6, which rapidly becomes a tail-chasing assumption.
5	As
4	Ks
3	Qs
2	Js
Strategy 3
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  123   Carry forward: 27
6	Jh	Hunting the ace-killers, retaining some flexibility, winning early points
5	10h
4	Ah
3	Jc
2	*
Strategy  4
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  150   Carry forward: 0
6	Ah	Maximum strength in every region
5	Ac
4	Qs
3	*
2	*
Strategy  5
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  145   Carry forward: 5
6	Ah	Maximum strength in main regions, try to hunt an ace and kill 10s; accept risk in small region
5	Ac
4	10s
3	Js
2	*
Strategy  6
Region	Cards	Strategy:                   Cost:  149   Carry forward: 1
6	10s	Hunt aces and accept risk in regions 5,6, steal points with aces & J in regions 2,3,4

Who is the political novice?

It is funny to me to see leaks from the administration trying to undercut GEN McChrystal as being naive about how the Washington game is played.  Seriously, is this the mark of an administration that is in charge of itself?  Is it good policy to be undercutting your own field commander?

This administration ahs no clue about what to do. Obama said 6 months ago that he had carefully studied the situation and had a plan. Now, not so much.

There is public support by the CJCS, GEN Petraeus and GEN McChrystal for the McChrystal plan. It is fully in line with current thinking about the conduct of COIN.

There is no political will in the admninistration to face reality, so instead they blather and treat foreign policy as if it were Chicago ward politics.

We just saw how sueful Chicago style politics is on the world stage where no one cares about your life story. So, who are the naive ones?

GEN McChrystal is a very savvy general: as a commander, as a warrior, as a professional.  His experience in Washington is on par or superior to any of the clowns in the current administration and he has been our most lethal general for years as commander of global SOF forces.

He made the speech he made in London as a way to force the administration to act in public on his plan. He is too savvy to be their fall guy. Whatever the decision is made, it will be the administration’s, and it will be pinned firmly to Obama: once he gets done wasting time on trivial issues.

Traders Roundtable: Maximum Compounded Return Versus Fear of Drawdown

In a recent traders roundtable discussion on the subject of balancing maximum gain with risk management the question was posed how to reconcile these two issues. A few definitions for the purposes of this essay are in order.

First let’s consider maximum compounded return to be defined as a system that is traded at every viable opportunity at the maximum level of acceptable risk with profits that are rolled into the total portfolio and with maximum acceptable risk in leveraging the markets money. This definition allows us to stay within natural risk limits but operate the machine as close to the red line of sustainable performance as possible.

Now let’s consider the fear of drawdown to be defined as the natural human response to operating power tools or heavy equipment in a dangerous setting as close to the edge as possible with full recognition of the consequences implied of potentially catastrophic failure. The human mind is capable of creating shades of distinction between various perceived levels of risk and these degrees of perception vary by individual. Some people are fully physically capable of walking within 5 feet of the edge of the balcony where as others can go right up to the edge and peer over and still remain in full normal natural control of their reactions. For each person though there is a line beyond which you judge that you are in dangerous territory in that extraordinary measures of protection and care must be taken because of the increased risk.

I am certain that there is a lot of evolutionary biology involved inside our brains which had to face this exact challenge on every front in prehistoric times or more technically, in the era of evolutionary adaptation. Even the most primitive caveman was certainly capable of appreciating the pay off of killing a mammoth for the future of survival needs of the tribe. And yet that same caveman was fully aware of the danger to himself that he took by stocking the huge beast. Sharpened by fear and hunger in the visions of a plentiful tomorrow, each caveman had to reconcile distention in some fashion and the successful ones passed on their adaptations to countless generations. This manifests itself in modern times in any place where risk and reward are brought together and we asked humans to make a balanced trade-off decision.

In every significant situation, and by significant I mean where impactful money is being rest for an impactful reward, the brain is flooded with chemicals which trigger flight or fight responses and invoke millions of years of stored up collective unconsciousness which shape and color our decisions and effectiveness of implementing those decisions. Trading is no different.

My sense is that for long-term safety and survival and given a trading system that generates a significant number of opportunities that long-term survival should drive us towards finding the minimum level of risk with which to trade to meet our specific financial goals. For those whose goal is expressed as maximum compounded rate of return, I suggest they are more likely than not to push it past the red line and come crashing down.

Without an appreciation of the real cost and friction associated with long-term trading in multiple market conditions that require constant adaptation is too easy to extrapolate the results of a few successful trades into next taxation that is far from being achievable. These false expectations are more likely than not to add to the level of stress and further degrade performance. My sense is that minimum risk levels rather than maximum risk levels are appropriate place to begin your inquiry into long-term trading as a potential career.

Therefore, I strongly suggest that you start with ways to use part-time small position sizing trading and learn to supplement your current income at your current standard of living and proceed in small stages, and getting larger only when supported by the evidence of long-term performance. It’s an incremental approach, it does not generate lottery size winds, but it will keep you in the game while you’re learning and keep your feet planted firmly on the ground.

Testing the Word 2007 Blog publishing template

This is to see how things come through when written in Word 2007 and pushed to the blog site.

Here is a sample picture:

 

Am wondering how tags and categories are handled?

Traders roundtable discussion: the issue of optimization in research

We were having a traders’ roundtable discussion on the topic of researching potential trading systems and the issue of optimization came up. This is a very important topic for traders who want to apply a systematic approach to trading markets. Here are some of the highlights of that discussion for you to consider as you prepare your trading strategies.

Typically when we think of optimization for a trading system we are looking at a process that incorporates multiple variables, parameters with different settings possible and perhaps a number of market filters or conditions which taken together with an exit strategy give us a multitude of ways to trade a particular concept or idea.

It normally begins with an idea the trader has based on insights fromtheory or from reflective practice where he believes the system gives a persistent advantage compared to the average market return  of simply buying and holding. It is also possible however that the edge may come from a brute force data mining operation that finds a statistical edge in some combination of market conditions. In other words, the insight comes from the result of massive computations and not from an intuitive or academic insight.

In either case , what we have is a system of multiple components, each of which can vary, and on an initial pass through with middle-of-the-road parameter settings we find a persistent edge in multiple markets with a statistical significance. Human nature being what it is, we would want to start testing different parameter settings for each component in order to determine the best mix for the most robust return and to find which of the parameters seem to have the most power when it comes to influencing the results. In statistics, this general approach is called factor analysis or principal component analysis.

In theory, you would want to find the absolute maximum return by finding the absolute optimum setting for each of the possible parameters and then take that into the market to begin trading. Taken to an extreme, this can produce a phenomenon of curve fitting or over optimization. What you can end up with is a system that would be perfect for the unique set of data conditions of the test. The problem of course is that the future may not ever show you that same data set again in your over optimize system will under perform much to your surprise.

The usual response to this phenomenon is to conduct testing with out of sample data. In other words designing the system on one data set and refining it to a certain degree and then testing it on a completely new set of market data to see if the edge persists. If you were systems development practice find you always discarding your systems after the out of sample test, it probably occurs as a result of over optimization.

In practice then, we want to find the trade-off between robustness of performance in multiple market conditions with out of sample testing that yields a persistent advantage in multiple market conditions but without trying to overturn the system for ideal conditions.

A way to keep this systematic approach in tune is to continue to monitor performance in a feed-forward approach that examines actual trading results to see how the performance results compare to the test and confirmation performance curves.

The bottom line: the more you rely on automatic trading systems, the more important your research and validation process becomes since you will not be using inexperienced traders override protocol to keep you from going off the deep end.

The future of education in a net-centric world

reinventinglife.org 

Surveys of CEOs and futurists alike all agree that the future is calling to us with a need for open systems, open thinking, collaborative organizations, workplaces and attitudes.  Net-centric  democratic education,  public and private movements for social justice, moral and honorable business enterprises,  and cross cultural communications all place a premium on skills, tools, and attitudes that encourage and multiply the network effect.

Doctoral research should reflect this same willingness to push boundaries, and encourage the use of collaborative teams of researchers and practitioners to explore collaborative theory and practice. If collaboration works in practice, there needs to be a theory of collaborative action, and the research in support of that practice should reflect the same principles as the work itself.

Like all new movements, there is a bootstrap problem when you try to go beyond conception into first action.  How do you create the initial conditions to generate the spark of collaboration which can ignite the passion and energy of research teams? The words sound good, but we need a place to try it on for size; We need supportive yet challenging places to discover, invent , develop and propagate the  best practices and techniques of collaborative knowledge creation.  We need places to test our theories, tell our stories and plan for the next cycle.

Dr Alana James’ growing community of practice at reinventinglife.org, centered on the principles and techniques of Participatory Action Research, is just such a node. It serves as an incubator for researchers and doctoral students seeking to develop the net-centric research effect. It goes beyond dry academic reports of practice, by being a live and vibrant laboratory for discovering, applying and reporting on the “theory-in-use” of open education.

It is a combination of challenging questions, a tool repository for new applications of digital learning and research, and is creating a circle of multiple competencies that will support  spin-off collaborations in a variety of settings that will propagate waves of change throughout the network like waves in a pond.

Dr James’ leadership in this area is paving a way for new approaches to research and practice and is exactly the kind of practice which needs support and recognition. She has the vision to imagine revolutionary positive changes in the world around her, the moral courage to invest in encouraging the Voices of students and co-researchers as we work to define and realize that future, and the skills to lead and encourage that change.

when post-positivism meets uncertainty

I am thinking about trying to figure out how to conduct research “properly” in the regions beyond the boundary of post-positivism.

Think of a farm that now borders the deep dark woods.

In the beginning we have a farm, surrounded by other farms, and over time, we haved figured out through trial and error, what works, even considering how variable the weather may be. The trial and error has been so successful that we have codified it into formal science and our success grew by leaps and bounds.

our farm now has expanded and on the border we encounter a deep, dark forest, whose boundaries we cannot see, only glimpse, and in whose depths we can see only shadows.

The farmland is the land where positivism and post-positivism excel. We are able to reduce and analyze problems and rely on the rules of cause and effect and the power of math to find answers and produce reliable solutions. It’s a land wherein all things are knowable.

In the forest, however, things change so much that our old rules don’t seem to apply. Things change faster there, unpredicatably, sometimes as if by chance, and at other times by rules that only sometimes seem to make sense, and the ruules seem to change as soon as we write them down. There are plenty of things we don’t yet understand. There seem to be things that are essentially unknowable. This is the land of complexity and chaos, where new rules sets are tentative and unproven. William Poundstone has written powerfully about these kinds of paradoxes in his book Labyrinths of Reason. The Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico researches this area in a scholarly manner.

It turns out that the epistemology of the farmland breaks down in the land of the forest. At the same time, the emerging rulesets of the forest don’t perform as well when you bring them into the farmland, because they are too tentative and uncertain, and in the farmland efficiency and certainty can be achieved and are rewarded.

People who would explore the forest know a lot less about that region than the people who explore the farmland know about the farms, and sometimes they talk past each other because they are coming from 2 different epistemologies, which in turn can create a disconnect at the ontological level itself (ie the nature of the world).

My sense is that in the “forest” of complexity, chaos and uncertainty, that mixed methods are going to be absolutely essential when it comes to developing an understanding of how to stay alive and thrive out there.

As we grow in knowledge we are able to push the boundaries of the farm out into the forest. everything that is coming out of the study of the science of complexity and uncertainty and chaos, however, suggests that there is some vast amount of forest that must remain out there beyond our ability to “domesticate” with the power of post-positivism.

This doesn’t disrespect post-positivism and all the good that it can do, it only says that the world is stranger than we CAN imagine so far, and that in the forest a different world view is useful.

The Sante Fe folks have a combination of pragmatism and constructionism threaded throughout their work, while at the same time having a deep and abiding respect for science and scientific method, as evidenced by the Nobel laureates they have on staff

what's your judgement on the state of the farm vs forest discussion? i pick #2

reflecting on the forest past the boundary of post-positivism

Creswell talks about the 4 worldviews that shape the  research goals, objectives, methods, interpretive measures, and sense making of researchers.  I inherited a post-positivist outlook from my formative years working in a machine shop with designers, engineers, craftsmen,  and other shop rats. My years of experience as a planner in the Army helped me appreciate the pragmatic worldview, which drives you to focus on results by any means necessary and without an overly strict compulsion to stay committed to a particular method, at the cost perhaps of sacrificing deep understanding or the pursuit of Truth.

I have rejected advocacy as a legitimate worldview for most of my life, with the exception of the values of freedom and democracy, as I am unwilling to committ on faith to untested beliefs, and have witnessed how advocacy can lead people to distort findings and spin results.

Constructivism seems more and more useful to me as I investigate social situations and complex human problems and opportunities.

The doctoral program is really helping me examine my beliefs and knowledge claims, and I have seen the positive results in my teaching that have emerged fron the cycles of reflective learning.

I have hit a tipping point where I must begin the convergent writing and thinking that will result in the dissertation, and it is with some sadness that I recognize that I have to put some of the divergent thinking aside in order to focus on task accomplishment.  This part of the journey wont be as much fun. I wish I could just push a button and get thru it and get back to scouting new knowledge areas which is how i prefer to spend every waking moment, in order to feed my dreams.

an exercise in “sense-making”: grappling with “design” and “planning”

a number of faculty and officers gathered around a whiteboard to try to create their own practical sense of the distinction and relationship between design and planning.  The series of diagrams reflected in the image unfolded over a discussion of several hours as we tried to connect the doctrinal and scholarly terms to our own words and experiences, to forge a link of meaning between doctrine and practice.