Ep 081 “Strategic Empathy: Grokking the Pendulum of Indecision”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard P. Feynman

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“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”

The Donald Rumsfeld matrix

I examine the strategic deficit disorder that absolutely dominates the US and western military establishments

I speak to the tools and critical thinking modalities that could spark and encourage competent martial imagination. Moral courage is necessary to tell the flag officer dullards and their Senior Executive Service (SES) necromancers that the emperor has no clothes.

If not, the unblemished record of defeat and stalemate will continue.

I describe some of the reasons I do it and the techniques I employ to get the single most accurate picture of what happened then to determine what’s going on now.

Recommended Listening:

On Strategic Empathy

Recommended Reading:

Christian Madsbjerg Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

Johnson and Abbe Developing Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in Military

Zachary Shore A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind

Dave Snowden Cynefin – Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World

Mortimer Adler How To Read a Book

Robert Strassler The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika (Landmark Series)

Mike Snook How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandlwana Revealed

Mike Snook Like Wolves on the Fold: The Defence of Rorke’s Drift

David Stahel Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East