Beware becoming the barber

Because all you see is haircuts

If I go to a barber, he'll tell me I need a haircut. 

If I go to a retired Army special forces guy, he'll tell me the US won the Cold War due to Irregular Warfare. (Specifically, "the [United States]…destroyed the USSR through hostile actions below the level of direct large-scale armed conflict, i.e., through [Irregular Warfare]."

Strategic assessment is part of the strategist’s toolkit. And sometimes that toolkit is obviously broken or off or underperforming. This quotation above is one of those cases.

For now, to keep a lid on the worm-can—let’s set aside the debate over the merits of this gentlemen’s argument. Some will undoubtedly be partial to his view, and others will oppose. Whether or not the US felled the USSR due solely or mostly through means that can be described as "irregular warfare" is almost beside the point. It's the one-term-answers-all approach that's disturbing. The full-throated certainty of the bumper sticker argument.

You would have to be one of two things to make a case like this. First, and most likely, you would have to feel a deep institutional (and interpersonal) pull to make such a strong case. That because you work in and among a like-minded community of individuals—you feel the need to fly the flag by making arguments that are net-positive for the "home team." There's a logic to this that anyone can appreciate. “It is difficult,” wrote Upton Sinclair, “to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

If I go to a barber, he's going to tell me I need a haircut. He knows he's a barber and therefore his livelihood depends on people needing his cuts to their hair. So he's going to tout the value of looking your best through a regular tidy trim and he’ll talk down disheveled long locks and the extra work it takes to braid and care for long hair. If barbers ruled the world, we'd all be getting weekly buzzes.

Now, the second reason someone makes a myopic case is a bit scarier…that is the statement comes from actual belief. This line of thinking is more dangerous because we working with a True Believer, someone so narrowly focused that a forest-walk produces only sight of a particular acorn.

When you’ve got someone with this level of myopia, they’re the hammer that sees only nails. In this case, you may have someone who claims not only that Irregular Warfare won the Cold War, but that Irregular Warfare may also cure the common cold.

When you see a strategic assessment that’s so very wrong, it’s worth stopping to better understand what caused it to go off track—so you can spot the same mistake in yourself!