Nina A. Kollars

Editors’ Introduction to the Thematic Issue: Bringing Interactive Simulations into the Political Science Classroom

Over the last 20 years the nature of undergraduate education has changed dramatically, at least in part in response to shifting student demographics. At the same time, college and university professors are being held to tougher standards of accountability by students, administrators, accreditation agencies, and legislatures. Students are increasingly focused on acquiring marketable skills and are less interested in learning disciplinary content. Administrators and accreditation agencies require evidence that learning outcomes are being achieved and learning objectives are being met. Yet, curricula often still emphasize the delivery of an undergraduate education as an academic apprenticeship in which students develop the same scholarly abilities used by their instructors. In political science departments, undergraduate curricula are often designed primarily around faculty expertise and interest rather than around a critical evaluation of the knowledge and skills that are essential to the discipline and to the student. The ability to build skills and knowledge that can serve a wider population is one area where simulations can serve to help us teach more effectively, especially when students are bombarded by a variety of different concerns and exist in a world that has so many more opportunities to be distracted than even their older siblings faced when they were in college 5 years ago. Simulations were first employed in political science as a means of understanding complex social processes that did not lend themselves to experimental testing, and their use soon expanded in scope to include the teaching of political science itself. In contrast to traditional pedagogical approaches that many of us encountered in college or in graduate school, simulations rely upon

War’s Horizon: Soldier-Led Adaptation in Iraq and Vietnam

Abstract Wartime adaptation is a process of adjustment from the war you planned for to the one you have. This process of adjustment is done, in part, by the practitioners of war in the theater of conflict–soldier-led adaptation. Drawing upon two case studies of gun truck development in Iraq and Vietnam I argue that soldiers created networks in order to adapt to battlefield challenges and that the pattern of those networks carries implications for the likelihood of formal adoption by the organization. Simply put, the pattern of the flow of ideas, resources, and skills across the battlefield may affect the likelihood of bottom-up adaptation.

Military Innovation's Dialectic: Gun Trucks and Rapid Acquisition

In times of war, the routes to innovation are often brutally radical instead of starry-eyed and fantastical. Still, compared with all the hype and hoopla about revolutionary technologies, little scholarly ink has been spilled over these “low-end” military innovations. “Field mods,” as they are often called, are not the sexy computerized drones and robotic sensations we associate with military innovation. This article recovers the process by which one such military innovation was created and argues that the seemingly bottom-up process of Gun Truck development was in fact a dialectical outcome that emerged from two different suborganization types: a learning organization and a bureaucratic stasis model. The findings from the case carry implications for innovation theory, our understanding of the nature of military organizations in war, and the challenge of technological change in wartime.

Organising Adaptation in War

In an institution characterised by hierarchy and organisational rigidity, how do military personnel accelerate adaptation to increase their chances of survival and mission success?

QR Panopticism: User Behavior Triangulation and Barcode-Scanning Applications

ABSTRACT The increasingly ubiquitous two-dimensional barcodes designed by the Denso Wave company, known as the QR code, were originally intended to track millions of parts as they moved about on high-speed assembly lines. Since then, these increasingly ubiquitous black and white squares have been applied to an ever-broader range of nonindustrial uses. In order to make use of these codes, the vast majority of consumers use smart phone technologies in order to convert the codes into usable information. However, neither Apple’s iOS nor Google’s Android operating systems include a robust native capability to decode printed barcodes. As a result, users of these devices must download and install third-party applications that will do this work for them. Our research question is straightforward: are there privacy and security risks associated with this emerging QR app ecosystem? We installed and analyzed over twenty of the most popular QR code applications. Our findings suggest that a majority of the most popular QR code readers found in the Apple App and Google Play marketplaces are not passive systems, but instead capture and transmit additional data about the device back to the application developer. The paper then considers the privacy and security implications of the QR code app ecosystem.

Genius and Mastery in Military Innovation

When it comes to creating new battlefield concepts and capabilities, buying cutting-edge machines is not enough.

The Rise of Smart Machines: The Unique Peril of Intelligent Software Agents in Defense and Intelligence

As computer processing power and cyber connectivity has increased, states have turned to intelligent software agents (ISA) as a potential means to extend the reach of their militaries and the analytical capacity of their intelligence agencies. Intelligent software agents (ISA) are computer programs that have the ability to learn, cooperate, and act independently of humans. The development of technologies that can operate autonomously has generated nearly as much anxiety as it has excitement, often to the detriment of clear eyed analysis. The path to acquiring and fully implementing ISA is farther away, and more complex than its advocates and detractors will admit. In addition to this, while ISAs could afford new capabilities for information analysis and battlefield risk reduction, they simultaneously introduce their own unique risks in implementation.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Methods? Methodological Games and Role Play

ABSTRACT In terms of gamification within political science, some fields—particularly international relations and American politics—have received more attention than others. One of the most underserved parts of the discipline is research methods; a course that, coincidentally, is frequently cited as one that instructors hate to teach and students hate to take. Given the well-documented merits of games in promoting student engagement and the key role of methods as a building block to student understanding of political science, this article attempts to rectify this oversight by introducing three games—Zendo, Murder Mystery, and the Archeologist’s Quandary— geared at teaching key concepts and approaches in research methods.

Learning to Fight and Fighting to Learn: Practitioners and the Role of Unit Publications in VIII Fighter Command 1943–1944

ABSTRACT A military cannot hope to improve in wartime if it cannot learn. Ideally, in wartime, formal learning ceases and the application of knowledge begins. But this is optimistic. In 1942, USAAF Eighth Air Force assumed it had the means necessary for victory. In reality, its technique and technology were only potentially – rather than actually – effective. What remained was to create the practice of daylight bombing – to learn. This article (1) recovers a wartime learning process that created new knowledge, (2) tests existing tacit hypotheses in military adaptation research, and (3) offers additional theoretical foundation to explain how knowledge is created in wartime

Trust and information sharing: ISACs and U.S. Policy†

Sharing rather than obscurity appears to be the contemporary consensus about how to create increasingly secure cyber systems. Nevertheless, in its contemporary form, national cyber defence planning is dominated by traditional logics of security that do not clearly capture both horizontal and vertical sharing systems in partnership. In contrast to this, surprising developments in defence are emerging through a community-oriented logic consisting of cooperation and transparency. This paper investigates the rise, and rapid proliferation of, Information Sharing and Analysis Centers.