Understanding and Defeating a Complex Adaptive ... - Australian Army

Decision-Making • Lieutenant Colonel Ian Langford
example of a counter-nation network’s network flow. Its network fed directly into
all communist systems, effectively enabling communist governments to interact and
adapt as the global environment changed.
Competition
Competition, in a pure Darwinian sense, is an essential element of a complex
adaptive system. This type of competition generally can be classed into two forms:
constructive and destructive. Constructive competition is essentially an efficiency
dividend. Through rapid evolution (encapsulated via the principles of a complex
adaptive system as previously defined), the system becomes more efficient and
increasingly effective at achieving its adaptation and goals. Destructive competition
is where a system, denied an effective network flow, replicates the wrong adaptation
traits, increasing its rate of entropy (more on this later) and descends over the edge
of efficiency into irreversible chaos.
Within counter-nation networks, an example of constructive competition
includes the efficiency of people trafficking networks’ ability to react to changes in
border protection laws and systems that grant them the capacity to continue their
movement of people. In essence, the people
smuggling model constructively competes
against border protection laws.
An example of destructive competition is
the defeat of the Tamil Tigers by the Sri Lankan
government when, as a result of a loss of network
flow, the leadership falsely believed that their
military capability had evolved to a point of
supremacy. The subsequent Tamil attempt
to bring their campaign to a final attritional
strategic battle (phase three of Mao Tse-Tung’s
The first step in attacking
and defeating a complex,
adaptive, counter-nation
system is to review the
principles and traits …
people’s popular warfare model), in near total ignorance of the strategic overmatch
that the Sri Lankan government possessed in terms of military hardware resulted
in their ultimate destructive defeat.
Complexity-based targeting (how to attack and defeat
a system)
The first step in attacking and defeating a complex, adaptive, counter-nation system
is to review the principles and traits as previously described and then proceed
to ‘map’ the network. Figure 1 maps a counter-nation network: in this instance,
a narcotics cartel and the Taliban have formed together to facilitate a mutually-
page 112 • Volume IX, Number 3 • Australian Army Journal