Galrahn over at Information Dissemination, just produced another brilliant piece on the realities of 21st century networks called The Challenges of the 21st Century Conversation.  While the subject of the post is US Naval “evangelists” (”Champions” in business terms), the post itself examines the complex interplay between narrative, myth, discourse control and the role of charisma (in Weber’s sense of the term).  One point he makes which struck me in particular was this:

The simple truth is, the next evangelist for the Navy will be online. The next evangelist will probably not be an Admiral in the US Navy, rather the evangelist for the Navy will be more similar to how information is disseminated in the era by which the conversation takes place. If I was playing the role of futurist, I would suggest the next evangelist for the military services will ultimately be a distributed number of popular and respected bloggers that make up an evangelist network.

I think he is quite correct in this for the simple reason that “discussions” are now the province of any who wish to take part in them (at least in most of the Western world).  Galrahn goes on to say that

I’ll take it one step further… the Army and the Marines already has their evangelist network, because in classic 21st century form the network core for the evangelical network of those services appears to be the Small Wars Journal, where a number of active duty officers ALREADY contribute to the strategic discussions regarding the challenges facing those services.

While he notes the importance of communications technologies and access to discussions, there is one point that may explain why networks such as Small Wars have taken the lead in building renaissance evangelical networks: the primary conflict and source of perceptual “upset” involves ground based theatres of operations.  Or, to put it another way, the US Army and Marines have had their perceptions challenged for the past seven years at the level of personal experience.  This “challenge” has forced them out of their bureaucratic perceptions and required that they develop new perceptions.

In many ways, this should not surprise anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; this is a quite normal process in the history of science and, more generally, in the history of how institutions use “knowledge” (broadly construed).  In its simplest form, 1990’s US military doctrine (perceptions and TTPs) could not effectively deal with the early 21st century battlefield - its predictive value was terrible once the conflict had moved beyond the very restricted sphere of “conventional” warfare.

Groups such as the Small Wars Journal and its predecessors asked “why” and proceeded to examine the axiomatic assumptions upon which the “conventions” were based.  This, inevitably, led to a rejection of many of those axiomatic assumptions, and the development of better predictive models that applied outside of “conventional” warfare.  The key to the speed with which the dominant paradigm shifted was in two factors.  First, the “discussion” took place amongst people with a wide variety backgrounds, many of whom were not in the military or the US.  Second, cheap, efficient and easy to use collaborative, interactive communications technologies were readily available.  The most likely consequence of this was the rapid development of renaissance evangelical networks with a fairly strong via negativa approach.

The same conditions are not currently operational in the US Navy.  They are not involved on a day to day basis in constant combat and they have not had, at the grassroots level, the experience of realizing that their “theory of reality” is wrong (BTW, ALL “theories of reality” are “wrong” or “biased” in some manner - this is the basic Map-Territory paradox in epistemology that Bateson talks about in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity).

I don’t know if the US Navy will be able to overcome this “problem” and develop a renaisance evangelical network similar to Smal Wars.  I would hope that they do but, as Kuhn pointed out, normal science is quite powerful in controlling discourse until its failure is rubbed in its face.