Breaking Barriers to Deeper Understanding: How Post-Modern Concepts Are ‘Value-Added’ to Military Conceptual Planning Considerations

Author’s Note: this article attempts to stimulate further discourse on what the military requires in terms of Design concepts, vocabulary, doctrine, and education- but there is no expectation that adding Design concepts will subsequently eliminate traditional military planning concepts. Design provides dissimilar and often unique perspectives for military applications. Critical and creative discourse is a cornerstone in Army Design methodology; yet to think with Design requires one to let go of the preferred and traditional planning processes and embrace uncertainty. Military leaders should not seek an ‘end-all be-all’ definition or ‘paint-by-numbers’ set of Design procedures, but use some of the suggested concepts offered in this article to help enhance their repertoire of thinking skills. What do post-modern philosophical concepts bring to military conceptual planning? If we do not at least consider their value, we have already closed ourselves off from learning, and learning how to learn…

This article contains some highly abstract concepts that have little use in any future military doctrine, and likely are not very useful to the greater force in terms of planning participation outside of conceptual planning efforts. This probably is not a very convincing way to begin an article that promotes the utility of Design concepts in military planning, but Design is best addressed both critically and creatively. Military readers may wonder, ‘why even bother with any post-modern philosophical concept at all?’ Design does not provide any quick or simplistic solutions, and unfortunately, our military culture struggles to see much long-term benefit when traditional processes seem to shuffle our organization along, albeit at a cost. Perhaps, if we at a minimum explore some of these post-modern abstract concepts, they might offer a prospect for evoking greater understanding of a complex military problem so that traditional planning efforts might better be applied. That is only if we can even start that discourse within our military institution beyond the limited trappings of ‘Design Doctrine’ such as FM 5-0 The Operations Process and FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency.[1]

‘Design Theory’ is different from ‘Design Doctrine’ in that it is not nearly as well received by the military institution. [2]  Design Theory continues to face significant adversity in any discussion about conceptual planning- there are enough institutional hurdles already in place that any meaningful dialogue is often disrupted right out of the gate.  Why does Design theory receive such a livid reception in military planning dialogues? Does Design offer anything useful to our military institution, and can we apply to practical scenarios any of the highly abstract and often intellectually distant processes to real military applications? This article offers up several highly abstract Design concepts in an effort to cross the bridge between conceptual planning and detailed planning; while these abstract concepts do not replace detailed planning, they might enhance our understanding and self-awareness as we trod along familiar paths to potentially unknown destinations.

Army Design methodology draws from across the wide and often eclectic range of scientific and philosophical fields that support holistic approaches to complexity for military planning concepts.[3] What the U.S. Army chose to include in recent Design doctrine, lexicon, and practice reflects specific organizational values, preferred logical processes, and institutional identity.  Although Design Theory reflects an immense and expanding field of new knowledge and unique logics, what the U.S. Army chose to omit from Design doctrine is also relevant to consider when thinking upon why the military now struggles with integrating conceptual with detailed planning in modern conflicts. This article addresses the post-modern philosophical assemblage concepts of ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ and how they contribute to Design synthesis in ways that military leaders might find useful. ^[4] These new philosophies present different processes on synthesizing social complexity where reductionism and analysis lack utility in understanding something like a dynamic conflict environment. [5] To the critics that scoff at the thought of applying philosophy or ‘pseudo-scientific theories’ to military conceptual planning, one might only reply- what if there is some usefulness here? In order to even consider their expediency in military conceptual planning processes, one must temporarily let go of cherished reductionist and linear planning logic that comprises virtually all military doctrine and professional education.^[6]

Interiority and exteriority concepts are most closely associated with the post-modern works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. [7] In their second series of essays on Critical Theory collectively titled ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, these philosophers weave a complex web of metaphors upon metaphors to explain how societies produce assemblages of knowledge.  They present many fascinating and somewhat intellectually challenging concepts on understanding social complexity in non-reductionist logic. This article will attempt to summarize several elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal work and relate them to practical military applications in conceptual planning processes. Before jumping into definitions of interiority/exteriority and assemblages, the overarching topic concerning organizational tension between traditional detailed planning logics and the new ‘Design’ conceptual planning approach requires additional explanation. Without acknowledging why the military resists alternate planning logics first, one cannot expect much success in discussing particular benefits of these alternate logic concepts specifically.

Since the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Scientific Reasoning, military planning and execution has relied almost exclusively upon the reductionist and linear logic where uniformity, repetition, and hierarchical decision-making dominate the field. [8] Recently, western militaries began adapting non-traditional logics several loosely related fields that this article groups as ‘Design Theory.’[9] Design pulls from an extremely wide and often eclectic range of theoretical constructs. [10] Whether drawing inspiration from General Systems Theory, post-modern philosophy, or social science’s Organizational Theory, this adaptive and expanding field emphasizes a non-hierarchical, anti-procedural methodology that promotes critical and creative thinking. To illustrate this, consider the following two scenarios:

Each musician sits down in specific locations in the orchestra pit with precise sheet music. The conductor coordinates everything, and the orchestra rehearses many times until they perform together in unison, a repeatable and exact performance, exactly as the composer designed the performance to sound. Deviation is prohibited, as individuality and non-conformity will destroy the cohesion of the orchestra.

The jazz players assemble at a local restaurant patio without any sheet music and begin playing around with their instruments and some melody ideas that each musician created and brought to the group. As one beat or riff catches the group, they begin to experiment with it, deviating from it and improvising new melodies while still holding to a loosely recognizable beat that wanders around the diverse landscape of musical sound.

In other words, Design Theory prefers musicians to exercise improvisational jazz and create in unscripted manners instead of lock-step performances of rehearsed sheet-music orchestra. [11] Whether one draws Design tools from the system-centric or post-modern philosophical fields or another dissimilar field entirely, the vast majority of Design concepts are unlike traditional military planning logic that drives the preponderance of professional military education and practices. [12] It appears that the more abstract or conceptual a Design concept, the greater an up-hill battle one faces with introducing terms such as interiority/exteriority into the military organization.

Making a Case for Post-Modern Abstraction in Conceptual Planning:

If Army ‘Design’ doctrine does not recognize the concepts of interiority/exteriority, why does it matter? To follow Design Theory’s emphasis on critical and creative thinking, any concepts, lexicon, or practices that stimulate innovation, creativity, and adaptation hold merit regardless if they are included in official doctrine or not. [13] Interiority/exteriority concepts for military Design applications draw inspiration from post-modern social science and philosophy theory where a high level of abstraction is required to grasp the concepts. This article employs several metaphors to attempt to convey to the reader these abstract concepts, as humans essentially learn through metaphor.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on linguistics postulated that, “primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphoric in nature…we act according to the way we conceive of things.”^[14] No metaphor survives literal application, and more often than not, a cloud of diverse metaphors potentially builds a superior abstract concept for readers to understand. This article will employ several dissimilar metaphors ranging from the horse carriage industry’s collapse in the early 20^th century to basic atmospheric models of tornados.  If you find it unusual that a military article on conceptual planning would purposefully employ non-military metaphors, there is a good reason for it. Drawing from non-military fields helps marginalize any military reader’s pre-filtering of data and bias. For instance, if we applied World War II operations on the German Eastern Front, many readers would lose sight of the abstract concepts and fixate instead on the minute details of the example- namely whether the Russians or Germans did this or that. “We are not very good at discovering the unexpected as we tend to see what we expect to see and find what we are looking for.” [15] Potentially, using any military metaphors or historic vignettes for the purposes of this article risk this deviation; selecting dissimilar metaphors from other fields puts the abstract concepts back into primary analysis. Furthermore, please take care to not take individual metaphors pedantically and instead consider how multiple and dissimilar metaphors synergize to help clarify highly abstract concepts. In other words, metaphors aid in explaining abstractions, but do not replace them. To introduce the concepts of interiority and exteriority, first consider the collapse of the horse carriage industry in the first decade of the 20^th century.

As the internal combustion engine, Industrial Revolution, steel and rubber industries, and assembly-line production methods merged into a paradigm shift in human transportation at the dawn of the 20^th century, the vast majority of horse carriage companies failed to adapt and instead collapsed as automobiles replaced horses. [16]  Companies went out of business because they remained fixated on a horse-centric future, and continued to plan accordingly while customers migrated towards automobile transportation. You might recognize that in hindsight, this paradigm shift in human transformation appears obvious; yet that does not explain why the majority of the horse carriage industry ignored the emerging trends until too late. Before the automobile became the evident and logical replacement for inexpensive and reliable human conveyance, many horse carriage businesses ignored or completely missed the indicators of a revolutionary change (paradigm) in transportation. [17] Why did an organization that was highly successful in the previous transportation logic of horse locomotion find itself unable or un—to anticipate a world where consumers no longer wanted their product? Relating back to our military institution, does the U.S. Army face a similar paradigm shift concerning 21^st century military conflict, or will everything continue to revolve around traditional high-intensity (including hybrid) conventional warfare for strategic planning purposes? [18] This is where the concepts of interiority and exteriority work with emergence to demonstrate useful abstract theoretical concepts.

Interiority and Exteriority: What Do They Bring in Value to Planning?

Suppose you lived in 1900, and owned one of the larger horse carriage companies in America. You stood at the height of American carriage market production and contemplated the next four years of growth and investment. Without knowing about the future of the automobile industry, how would you guide your company’s business strategy for the next decade?  Of the companies that eventually went out of business by 1910, they overwhelmingly anticipated horse carriage transportation to remain what it was in 1900- the dominant method for human conveyance. People will buy carriages, the automobile will remain a “rich man’s toy”, and skilled laborers would hand-assemble carriages while integrating proven technological advances as they emerge. In other words, their narrative about the future reflected only known information. This bounds the interiority of their organization’s knowledge and reinforces a linear causality in logic where the future looks much like the present. Interiority reflects the familiar and known.

Ever notice that most books or movies about ‘the future’ strongly reflect everything in the period the science fiction originated from, to include contextual symbols and ideas on what the future would look like? We project the future in the forms we must intimately understand- we use our interiority to construct an imagined future that remains quite devoted to the present minus the laser rays, shiny space suits, and robots and aliens that look like humans covered in make-up and prosthetics.^[19] If we struggle to imagine the future without abandoning the symbols and concepts that structure our present reality, how hard is it for a horse-centric transportation company to envision a future without horses?

Returning to the horse company metaphor, consider how the carriage industry reflects some patterns in military organizations where planning and preparations often appear to be oriented towards winning the previous war instead of anticipating the next conflict.^[20] Historian Brian Linn criticizes the military in Echo of Battle of resisting change, maintaining “intellectual rigidity, a propensity to mistake slogans for strategic thinking, and the dogmatic belief in itself as the ‘best trained, best armed, best led force’ that has ever existed.”^[21] Recent British Ministry of Defence conceptual planning doctrine expands upon this with, “as closed and ritual-bound organisations, militaries have strong cultures that can be fiercely resistant to change and which shape how they develop and how they act.”^[22] Chinese military theorists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s criticize American interiority and ‘in-house assumption’ barriers from an Eastern perspective in Unrestricted Warfare. They charge Westerners with “observing, considering, and resolving problems from the point of view of technology” as typical American thinking.[23] Organizational theory uses the term ‘in-house’ assumption to describe the institutional barriers that help protect an organization’s interiority from change even when reality exposes any fallacies in logic.[24] Military innovation is difficult because innovation “questions the routines and systems that underpin core competencies… [it also] threatens existing capabilities in which militaries have made heavy investment and around which sub-community interests and cultures have developed.” [25]  Does the military as an institution share some of the ‘in-house assumptions’ that are setting up organizations in similar manners where horse carriages are in the future instead of automobiles? Does detailed planning such as MDMP, JOPP, and MCPP reflect an emphasis on interiority thinking instead of critical and creative thinking about what exists outside these institutional boundaries? [26] Does the military overemphasis on hierarchical decision-making foster a ‘group-think’ approach to the world that drives an organization to prefer seeking information relevant to the interiority and self-relevance of the institution?[27] These meta-questions quickly lead outside the boundaries of the interiority into the depths of the unknown- the exteriority of a system.

Returning to 1900 and sitting behind the desk as head of a horse carriage company, what are the unknown elements that either already exist outside your interiority (known and accepted information) or will emerge as the system adapts and transforms through time? What are the emergent properties that exist outside a carriage company’s interiority? Or, what do they not know, and what do they know that is no longer accurate? New production and mass-assembly processes paired with a growing urban population of unskilled workers combine with the combustion engine, steel and rubber resources, and a rapidly adaptive physical landscape of cities and towns connected by roads all escape the ‘known-knowns’ of a carriage company’s interiority in 1900.  Horse carriage companies grasped some of these concepts, but failed to assemble them together and anticipate a future without a horse-centric transportation need. [28] More importantly, the core American values of independence, prosperity, and interaction readily accepted the automobile as a new symbol that accomplished everything the horse carriage did more effectively.

This massive transformation in core American values that manifest in symbols demonstrates the innovation and patterns of adaptation inherent in the exteriority of the carriage company’s system of knowledge production. [29] The ‘unknown-unknowns’ that would quickly dismantle the entire horse carriage industry already existed in 1900, except the majority of carriage company owners just failed to recognize them holistically. One can fill volumes describing each part of a pile of bicycle parts, but you need to assemble it to gain the ability to ride. [30] While it is easy for those that already have the concept of a bicycle within their interior knowledge, what about when bike parts litter one’s interiority but they have yet to be assembled by the pioneer to invent the first bicycle?

By combining Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of complementary yet antithetical forces with the historic metaphor of the American carriage industry’s collapse in the early 20^th century, this article offers one perspective on depicting the concepts of interiority and exteriority in figure 1 below. ^[31] While interiority and exteriority remain highly abstract concepts that defy traditional description, figure 1 provides explanation within the familiar doctrinal and reductionist framework generally preferred by military organizations. [32]

Figure 1: an incomplete contrast between ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’

            Figure 1 addresses the concepts of interiority and exteriority; however, how these two forces interact within a society or organization such as the military or a horse carriage company requires the use of another dissimilar metaphor. Consider for a moment how tornados form in the atmosphere. Without going into more detail than necessary for this metaphor, they draw significant energy from a large low-pressure system and often focus that destructive force to a finite point on the ground. The swirling airflow and interaction of interior energy in the condensation funnel in relation to the exterior atmosphere and surface provide a useful conceptual structure for pairing up these highly abstract post-modern philosophical concepts. They also provide one way to potentially visualize the concept in a process that readers might find familiar by using tornado movement. Figure 2 merges the aforementioned concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s interiority/exteriority and applies military levels of war (tactical, operational, and strategic) up into the clouds of abstraction to form the basis for an overarching military planning ‘assemblage.’

Figure 2 provides a conceptual graphic that works with the atmospheric metaphor to relay one method for understanding ‘assemblages.’ Another way of clarifying between interiority knowledge and exteriority often revolves around explanation versus description. We seek ‘what’ and can readily describe what we know when we use our interiority knowledge- this is our familiar landscape. The military prefers to reduce things down tactically, where description and analysis delivers quantifiable ‘knowns’ we can touch, manipulate, and measure. [33]  When we seek explanatory answers on why complex adaptive systems behave as they do, we must rise up from our interiority landscape and enter the uncertain and dynamic exteriority where change and adaptation obscure our understanding. The following narrative frames the abstract and complex components of figure 2 below:

Consider a large and dark storm cloud shifting and swirling over a flat landscape. The storm cloud is so vast and impenetrable that we cannot make much sense of its form, or ‘map out’ the vast and complex interior of energy and atmospheric elements. This reflects the unknown, or the exteriority of our knowledge base. We are on the ground, and the flat landscape around us represents the ‘known’ or ‘map-able’ interiority of our knowledge base- everything we already know and understand can be found on our interiority landscape. To introduce a linear time element to this metaphor collage, the tornado that forms follows a seemingly random line with a beginning, present, and end. For us on the ground, we ‘know’ where a tornado touched down, and we can make sense of what it destroyed in its path because this represents our past.

As the tornado wiggles along, the ever-moving tip of the funnel touches down at ‘present’ time and space which represents where we are for the moment. As a tornado passes over you, one does not know where it will go- the anticipated path represents the future state of the complex system. The swirling exchange of wind from the exteriority and interiority are analogous to some of the abstract concepts yet to be addressed, but the tornado holistically represents the ‘assemblage’ that spans from a level of high abstraction deep in the cloud (where human transportation exists as a vague and amorphous concept) down to medium levels of abstraction where themes and patterns emerge. Mechanical locomotion, fuel-consuming systems, and gravitational interaction with topography all interact here at a broad and adaptive level, still within the cloud but closer to the ground.

Within the violent and adaptive funnel cloud, various competitors to horse-centric transportation compete and interact, while horse carriage processes sharpen into a point on the ground at the tip of the tornado. This is where the assemblage transforms, creates, and destroys the landscape- our perception of reality. The past features horse-centric transportation as far back as the interior knowledge stretches, and our institutional values and tenets help harden our ‘field assumptions’ so that we prefer to anticipate the tornado to move along the path we prefer it to- towards more horse-centric transportation.

What we fail to anticipate is the creation of a paradigm in transportation pulled from the exteriority of the dark clouds- the automobile industry that disrupts the future landscape in ways we find confusing and unexpected. Automobiles will change as well, and the assemblage continues with a violent and confusing interaction between the vast exteriority (unknown knowledge) and our flat, map-able, and protected interiority landscape…

            Figure 2 ties several aforementioned Design concepts while figure 3 below provides examples of an assemblage using the horse carriage metaphor. The tornado graphic is a central illustration to the remainder of the article, and the remainder of this article will continue to add additional abstract concepts to the basic graphic concept seen in figure 2. Abstract concepts are notoriously difficult to convey effectively, and there are undoubtedly many other possible ways to depict such abstraction. Design Theory often uses the linear ‘past-present-future’ construct of narratives to cater to how humans prefer to learn and make sense of the world.[34] The tornado travels along a timeline where past tornado behavior is behind the immediate (present) point where the tornado interacts with the ground. While complex systems such as tornados resist prediction, the ‘future’ reflects one of many paths the tornado system might take through emergent conditions within the entire assemblage. Figure 3 attempts to explain a horse-centric transportation assemblage onto this tornado graphical concept.

Layering the ‘horse carriage industry’ metaphor within the tornado graphic, the past, mapped upon the interiority landscape represents the horse-dominant age of ground transportation while the future indicates an auto-centric emergent state, or potentially some other form of transportation yet undiscovered or fully realized.  The field assumptions and organization values/tenets act as a protective barrier around the interiority- this propels an organization such as a horse carriage company to make sense of the world by embracing what is known, and avoiding high levels of abstraction and uncertainty. [35] The tactical level, as depicted in the graphic as the ‘tip of the twister’ denotes our preference to focus upon immediate events, tangible details, and quantifiable data- the scientific method and many military procedures operate at this very low level of abstraction where interiority knowledge is ample, specific, and reducible. [36] But when the tornado skips along a seemingly chaotic path where prediction fails, how can an organization such as a carriage company or the military break out of ‘thinking in the box’ and rise above the landscape of interiority knowledge?

Metaphors within Metaphors: Design in Discourse

 Since the horse carriage industry’s interiority remains bounded within known information and protected by a barrier comprised of organizational ‘in-house assumptions’ and core values, the past behavior of tornados interacting along the fixed plane of interiority is generally more influential in how that organization contemplates the tornado’s future. [37] Alternatively, the path of destruction behind the tornado becomes more important than the larger and more perplexing storm system obscured by layers of dark clouds above. This vast and swirling storm system denotes the illusive ‘exteriority’ where persistent creation and adaptation evolves the storm system and guides the tornado towards a future state. To play with both metaphors once more, the horse carriage industry prefers to consider where the tornado is heading based upon tangible information as depicted by previous known destruction; known implying ‘interiority’ instead of unknown (exteriority). [38] Dark clouds that mask the exteriority of the system possess the numerous swirling and adapting factors such as the emerging assembly line process, steel and rubber innovations, and the advancement of combustion engine efficiency. These are located in the exterior because they are unknown to carriage organizations that fixate only upon their own interiority. In other words, when one only thinks in horse-centric processes, they will never anticipate a future with anything but horses. What exists above, within the swirling dark clouds of exteriority, where unknown-unknowns and paradigm shifts abound? [39] More importantly, how does the assemblage interact between these concepts of interiority and exteriority? Continuing with the tornado metaphor and the exchange of air flow and energy, figure 4 below introduces the associated abstract concepts of territorialization and deterritorialization for consideration on assemblages.

Just as thermal currents and electrically charged molecules sweep through a storm system and exchange energy as the funnel cloud progresses across the landscape, these abstract concepts of territorialization and deterritorialization work in similar fashion, shaping the assemblage and generating adaptive transformation of the system over time and space.

Explaining Territorialization within the Tornado Metaphor:

Let’s start with ‘territorialization.’ Deleuze and Guattari propose the supporting abstract concepts of ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ that support this overarching concept called an assemblage. “The territory is the first assemblage, the first thing to constitute an assemblage; the assemblage is fundamentally territorial.” [40] Although A Thousand Plateaus returns to territorialization throughout most of their 514 page book, this article attempts to take a generalized approach to this concept in order to apply it to military planning considerations while applying the horse-carriage metaphor as a foil. As territorializing forces are the preserving elements that ‘hold together’ an assemblage, they apply to those phenomenon that drive horse carriage businesses towards continued competition, cooperation, and adaptation in the vast free market of capital enterprise. These are more abstract concepts that generally explain some of the complex system behavior- the higher into abstraction we move, the further we get from tactical details and traditional linear thinking. [41] Returning to the tornado graphic, the swirling air currents and system energy that hold the funnel cloud in rotation represent more abstract concepts within a complex system, such as the perpetual notions of Smith’s invisible hand of economics, or American entrepreneurship and innovation values.  For a horse carriage company owner, these abstract hierarchical business structures formed the organization of carriage companies of the period, geography, and physical elements along with societal laws and values as they relate to the dawn of the 20^th century. [42] Although technology and society transformed since that period, many of the same highly abstract forces remain in place for modern businesses and our military institutions. Prosperity-driven agendas, hierarchical decision-based organizations, market competition and adaptation remain abstract yet constant forces that we must continue to make sense of.  Innovation, adaptation, and dynamic change work within territorialization to create ‘emergence’ where new ideas and discovery break down barriers and shatter cherished myths. Territorialization creates, but also destroys. Just as a new paradigm such as the emergence of the affordable and mass-produced automobile transformed the individual ground-transport market at the dawn of the 20^th century, it had to destroy the thriving and enduring horse-centric market along with those associated societal values, assumptions, and symbols. [43]

            If the interiority and exteriority of an assemblage interact like a tornado traveling along a fixed but complex path of fierce interaction, the territorializing phenomenon maintains the shape of the funnel cloud. This indicates that while an organization’s interiority may remain rigid and bounded the complex system of swirling forces do generate patterns that influence change. The funnel cloud holds its form and preserves the assemblage while an organization such as a horse carriage company does encounter transformation of its interiority through the passage of time (narrative). The world changes around us, and we struggle to make sense of it. [44] The second phenomenon introduced by Deleuze and Guattari, termed ‘deterritorialization’, operates as a disparate force to the territorializing that preserves the funnel cloud structure. In an Eastern sense, they reciprocate like yin and yang. What territorializing provides to the assemblage, deterritorializing removes.

Explaining Deterritorialization within the Tornado Metaphor:

            Deterritorializing as a force recombines and replaces elements within the assemblage in the manner that entropy claims the inefficiencies and failures of adaptation as observed in natural evolution. Deleuze and Guattari employ the metaphor of a black hole, whereas this article applies the swirling forces of high and low pressure air masses within a dynamic storm system to relate to how territorialization and deterritorialization influence the abstract concept of an assemblage in organizational theory. [45]   As figure 4 depicts territorialization as the force that imparts emergence, adaptation, and innovation through preserving the system, deterritorialization does the opposite by forcing destruction, elimination, and extinction of various elements of the assemblage. Kuhn also warned of how a paradigm shift in a field would destroy the existing theory, and render those scientists and practitioners that clung to old ways as obsolete in the wake of the new paradigm.[46]  Returning to the horse carriage metaphor, what abstract elements forced destruction of accepted horse-centric concepts while dissimilar ones worked to preserve other elements of transportation enterprises? Economic forces, the ‘Gold Standard’, and the Industrial Revolution reflect some of the abstract phenomenon within the territorializing force that drives the horse carriage industry along the timeline in 1900. Deterritorializing forces such as stock market instabilities through investment fluctuations, the emerging global economy, and the expanding market for cheaper yet faster modes of transportation instead of horse-centric locomotion reflect the destructive nature of the assemblage. Whether we liked it or not, the horse’s position as a central element to ground locomotion would be destroyed by the emerging forces that ushered in the automobile industry. Yet within the first decade of the 20^th century, many previously prominent carriage companies would be eliminated and many highly skilled carriage artisans unemployed or performing different work. [47] How did they fail to see the horse’s demise, or did they instead don blinders and expect the future to remain ‘horse-centric’ despite the swirling forces of the human transportation assemblage?

Connecting the Assemblage:

Figures 2-4 features a blue line connecting various elements within the assemblage ranging from the high abstraction within the exteriority down through lower levels of abstraction into the strategic, operational, and eventually tactical levels of refinement (interiority) where the present state of the system exists in tension. [48] Although depicted as a line, the higher within the exteriority, the greater the abstraction, while the closer to the point of friction with the interiority along the timeline, the more specific the phenomenon. To consider this another way, ‘human transportation models in tension between speed and cost’ reflects a high level of abstraction, while ‘American horse carriage industry on the eastern coast in 1900’ reflects a lower level of abstraction. Figure 5 below attempts to illustrate how abstract concepts link down into interiority (tactical) thinking for an organization such as a horse carriage company experiencing the paradigm shift that will destroy its industry. The swarming exchanges of territorialization and deterritorialization become interrelated through a swirling and changing web of actors, phenomenon, patterns, and forces throughout the entire assemblage as it moves along the timeline creating a narrative.[49]

For the horse carriage industry in 1900, the entire assemblage (figure 5) represents the abstract phenomenon where human transportation develops along the linear timeline as society progresses. At a high level of abstraction within the exteriority, the concept of a ‘transportation machine’ draws parallel with Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in A Thousand Plateaus where theoretical constructs such as war, economics, or love remain in the exteriority while finite examples of specific military conflicts, business successes, and individual relationships occur within an organization or society’s interiority. [50]  With figure 5, the horse carriage company may self-identify within its interiority that, “we are an organization that builds and sells carriages” and still be unable to consider a future where the same organization transforms into something that does not center on horses. This is despite the higher level of abstraction where carriage companies are merely extensions of a larger phenomenon of human transportation and economic progression. In other words, is the company a horse carriage company, or a transportation company that currently specializes in horse-centric locomotion? Those organizations that look beyond their interiority to recognize that they may be horse-centric in the present, but auto-centric in the future are the ones capable of adapting and innovating to remain prosperous. Switching from horses to armies, is the U.S. Army an organization that defines itself as conventional military conflict-centric, or as an organization that may be unconventional and asymmetrical-centric for future 21^st century conflict that is unlike anything previously seen? What are the assemblages out there facing our military institution, and how does our interiority landscape and field assumptions inculcate us from the forces of territorialization and deterritorialization as the complex system adapts and transforms?

Interiority, Exteriority, and Assemblages in Conclusion:

Highly abstract concepts are notoriously difficult to apply in discourse, especially when an organization prefers a reductionist and linear logic conveyed in a simple and generally static hierarchical vocabulary as the military routinely does.^[51] This article attempted to introduce to the military design debate the useful post-modern concepts of interiority and exteriority. These concepts combine with the supporting notions of territorialization and deterritorialization forces to form the highly abstract organizational theory concept of assemblages. Immediate reaction to such challenging and potentially problematic abstractions from the traditional military mode of reductionist and linear thinking is to dismiss them outright as unnecessary and entirely too cerebral for a fighting force. [52] This is dangerous reasoning because it reinforces an organization relying upon interiority knowledge and emphasizing description of only what is known- such as when a carriage company in 1900 only sees horse-centric transportation for the next decade. Just as those major horse-centric organizations refused to adapt and went out of business after decades of prosperity, our military risks future relevance and effectiveness in the next conflict if we also fail to adapt and look beyond our preferred logics and beyond our self-bounded landscape of interior knowledge.

            Theoretical abstractions such as Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage concept require patience and persistent reflection to develop prosperous Design discourse for a group of practitioners. The tornado graphic and horse-carriage metaphor might be useful for some, and inappropriate for others. There is no ‘gold standard’ or Holy Grail for Design explanation. There are few short cuts or checklists, otherwise a millennium of philosophers and brilliant military leaders would clearly have written them for us ages ago. [53] This article proposes the concept of applying clouds of dissimilar metaphors to holistically build cognitive synergy and understand highly abstract concepts for direct Design application. While the atypical coupling of a tornado graphic metaphor with the historical metaphor of the horse carriage industry demise in the early 20^th century reflect one possible method for using cloud metaphor techniques, readers undoubtedly come up with many dissimilar other combinations based upon individual experience, knowledge, and creativity. With Design’s emphasis on innovation, exploring the exteriority of a system, and critical thinking, that illustrates the whole reason for breaking away from lock step linear ‘proceduralizing’ typical of military planning. [54] Future Army Design discourse cannot merely center on how to indoctrinate select terms, concepts, and practices into a “paint-by-numbers” military conceptual planning model that promises to be applicable to all future conflicts and provide universal comprehension to the widest audience possible.^[55] Instead of reinforcing traditional and hierarchically focused learning processes that work in some tactical applications (when complexity is not a prominent factor), the military must emphasize critical and creative thinking. This means that post-modern concepts such as interiority and exteriority do bring value to the conceptual planning process. While any true Design deliverable must provide detailed planners the tasks, objectives, goals, and purpose for subsequent detailed planning framework, highly abstract approaches such as those applied in this article infuse deep understanding and explanation to back up those direct tasks, details, and directives for the military to action upon.

Thinking only from within your interiority prevents you from thinking about anything but horse-filled futures, even as the automobile paradigm shatters your industry.

Whether planning involves decision-making for adapting one’s business to emerging transportation trends or recognizing that future military conflict may not return to the desired conventional high-intensity operations, focusing exclusively on one’s interiority of knowledge may be problematic for accomplishing long-term strategic goals. Furthermore, when an institution promotes uniformity and ‘group-think’ over critical and often provocative introspection on whether core values and tenets (in-house assumptions) prevent emergent knowledge from flowing from the exteriority to the interiority, failure becomes a useful teacher in stimulating adaptation or elimination.[56] Essentially, the U.S. Army may need to consider how some horse carriage companies adapted to automobile production while a majority of the remainder collapsed into extinction. As the assemblage known as the ‘war machine’ continues to generate future conflicts while engaging new concepts and forms, many traditional and formerly successful processes, techniques, and logics become deterritorialized into obscurity.^[57]

This article set out to demonstrate how some post-modern and highly abstract concepts within Design offer utility in conceptual planning endeavors for military organizations. Although some readers continue to seek a ‘Design Holy Grail’ that summarizes what is essential within Design, you will not find that because it simply does not exist. At best, Design exists for military practitioners in hybrid combinations of revised Design doctrine, theory, and a wide yet dissimilar variety of fields, disciplines, and novel concepts that interact and adapt as complex military environments continue to transform.  There is no rulebook, and therefore the argument that “post-modernism and other Design Kool-Aid is not needed in military conceptual planning” rings false. By closing off potentially useful concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Ranciere among other post-modernist thinkers, military planners essentially fail to “realize strategic aims by examining the assigned problem from multiple perspectives.” [58] Should military planners insert a “Design exercise with interiority and exteriority concepts” into mission analysis during their military decision making process (MDMP) as a rigidly structured procedure for planning? Certainly not- this violates core principles of creative and critical thinking as espoused by Design. Instead, military planners might consider post-modern concepts offered in this article as conceptual tools for their toolbox. Some complex situations warrant their use, but each time they will likely be a highly tailored and customized approach that resists repetition and proceduralization. While the tornado graphic may bring added value to some approaches, it may be entirely useless in many others. Creative thinking and adaptation drive the right Design approach- to simply follow something written down in doctrine or structured within a solitary theory or concept is as limiting as just thinking within one’s bounded interiority. At that point, you just might be “drinking the Kool-Aid” of your organization’s preferred logic, and like most major horse carriage companies at the turn of the 20^th century, your days might be limited by the extent of your ability to adapt with change.