Great Piece! The quote on resilience as both a defensive and offensive advantage landed hard. I am on the resilient warpath: one single-threaded data pipe is exactly the vulnerability that lets an adversary punch above their weight. Alternate pathways that diversify the choke points multiply our strength while forcing the other side to invest heavily just to keep up. Resilience as deterrence. One question that I would appreciate your perspective on, is how does this scale across alliances where partners have very different tech baselines? Does shared resilience strengthen the coalition or create new single points of failure at the seams?
Dave, thanks very much. I really like your phrase, **"resilient warpath."** :-)
Your question actually gets to the heart of what I've been trying to understand for the better part of three decades, both as a scholar and in practice. I was fortunate to have senior leaders who were willing to let me test some of these ideas in the field—across the CENTCOM theater and, later, much of USSOCOM's global operating environment, including 'under fire'.
Those experiences convinced me that resilience is not simply a defensive attribute; it's a source of competitive advantage.
On your question, I think the answer is **both**. Shared resilience can become one of an alliance's greatest strengths—but only if it is designed as a **polycentric** system rather than a centralized one. If resilience depends on a single architecture, common platform, or dominant node, you've simply created a larger target. But if allies contribute complementary capabilities, overlapping redundancies, and multiple pathways for adaptation, then every additional partner increases the coalition's resilience while simultaneously multiplying the dilemmas confronting an adversary.
That's one of the central ideas behind what I call the **General Theory of Compound Security (GTOCS)**.
The objective isn't simply interoperability; it's designing adaptive ecosystems where resilience, legitimacy, and collective capacity reinforce one another while reducing the opportunities for cascading failure at the seams.
I'd love your thoughts after you've had a chance to look at the longer piece. This is exactly the kind of question I've hoped it would spark.
Great Piece! The quote on resilience as both a defensive and offensive advantage landed hard. I am on the resilient warpath: one single-threaded data pipe is exactly the vulnerability that lets an adversary punch above their weight. Alternate pathways that diversify the choke points multiply our strength while forcing the other side to invest heavily just to keep up. Resilience as deterrence. One question that I would appreciate your perspective on, is how does this scale across alliances where partners have very different tech baselines? Does shared resilience strengthen the coalition or create new single points of failure at the seams?
Dave, thanks very much. I really like your phrase, **"resilient warpath."** :-)
Your question actually gets to the heart of what I've been trying to understand for the better part of three decades, both as a scholar and in practice. I was fortunate to have senior leaders who were willing to let me test some of these ideas in the field—across the CENTCOM theater and, later, much of USSOCOM's global operating environment, including 'under fire'.
Those experiences convinced me that resilience is not simply a defensive attribute; it's a source of competitive advantage.
On your question, I think the answer is **both**. Shared resilience can become one of an alliance's greatest strengths—but only if it is designed as a **polycentric** system rather than a centralized one. If resilience depends on a single architecture, common platform, or dominant node, you've simply created a larger target. But if allies contribute complementary capabilities, overlapping redundancies, and multiple pathways for adaptation, then every additional partner increases the coalition's resilience while simultaneously multiplying the dilemmas confronting an adversary.
That's one of the central ideas behind what I call the **General Theory of Compound Security (GTOCS)**.
[accessible at: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1jwbfvu2qnspw58fgsn9e/Friction-as-Feedback-A-General-Theory-of-System-Performance-Under-Compound-Stress.pdf?rlkey=r1hemk0x96tbo5nivodyvspnv&st=6rls13ox&dl=0]
The objective isn't simply interoperability; it's designing adaptive ecosystems where resilience, legitimacy, and collective capacity reinforce one another while reducing the opportunities for cascading failure at the seams.
I'd love your thoughts after you've had a chance to look at the longer piece. This is exactly the kind of question I've hoped it would spark.