Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  Unlike decentralized music file-sharing networks that can actually cause damage to the large centralized recording industry (because they trade in exactly the same resource), the small cells of the leaderless jihad are not a continual threat to organized nations. But they are also like file-sharing networks in that there is a fairly low cost to enter cells of what Sageman calls “wannabe” terrorists on the Internet. There is a concern that these cells will gain prestige and converts as long as they are seen as defending Islam from an existential threat from the West. According to research by Sageman and anthropologist Scott Atran, young people attracted to the leaderless jihad are looking for opportunities to be heroes in a global cultural clash between Islam and the West. Any signs that indicate the West is on a global crusade will reinforce the sense of jihad as a heroic cause. The fear is that given enough reinforcement of their message and enough resources, this leaderless jihad could re-form into the kind of dangerous distributed network that al-Qaeda was on September 11, 2001.

  But the “war on terror” environment that first splintered al-Qaeda and then, through the invasion of Iraq, helped convince young recruits to join the virtual jihad has changed rapidly and continues to do so. U.S. combat troops are pulling out of Iraq, and Muslim-on-Muslim violence has become the predominant theme there. The multiculturalism and freedom of religion offered in the United States differs markedly from the hostility perceived against Muslims in much of Europe (France’s ban on Islamic veils, for example), and Muslims continue to see the United States as a land of opportunity. All of this diffuses the message that had originally united al-Qaeda as an adaptable, decentralized organization.

  In other words, although the leaderless jihad has plenty of distributed agents spreading hatred on the Internet, it still lacks both the resources and the central challenge to make it a truly adaptable organization.

  Adaptable organizations combine the resources, power, and unified goals of a central controller with the nimble and adaptive actions of multiple semi-independent sensors. Such systems evolved in nature over millions of years. We don’t have such temporal luxury. Can such a system be created out of a completely decentralized system? Can it be created out of a completely centralized system?

  STANLEY VS. THE OSPREY: A BATTLE FOR THE ADAPTABLE SOUL OF A BUREAUCRACY

  Two recent weapons development programs, both developed out of the U.S. Department of Defense, will illustrate how the same organization can be woefully inadaptable—wasting time, money, and human lives with little to show for it—or spectacularly adaptable and innovative. They illustrate the contrast between centrally controlled, “intelligently designed” systems shielded from selection, and systems that emerge, as in nature, by independent problem solvers under the sort of pressure that one also sees in natural selection.

  The V-22 Osprey is an odd chimera of a military vehicle, part helicopter, part airplane.22 It was dreamed up by military planners envisioning the perfect aircraft following the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. They ordered it to have the ability to be able to swoop agilely into hot landing zones, drop off or remove troops, then convert into an airplane and fly away fast. Unlike an airplane, which is likely to crash if the engines fail, the Osprey was to have a helicopter’s ability to “auto-rotate” with the rotors spinning freely, to a survivable landing in case of engine failure. Soldiers or marines would be able to exit quickly from low altitudes via static lines, or leave from a rear ramp upon landing. The Osprey was to have air-combat-worthy maneuverability and a massive forward facing canon to ward off enemy fire. It was to be protected from nuclear, chemical, and biological fallout.23

  The program to build the Osprey began in 1981. The first Ospreys ready for combat were deployed in late 2007, twenty-six years after a contract was awarded to the only entrant in the competition to produce them. In 1986 it was estimated that 1,000 Osprey would be produced in ten years at a cost of $37.7 million each. The 1996 deadline was missed, but a year later a grand total of five Ospreys were delivered to the U.S. Marine Corps. By the end of 2009, only 181 had been procured, at a cost of $93.4 million each.

  We’ve come to somehow accept massive cost overruns and ridiculously unmet timetables in military procurement contracts, as if it’s just business as usual for the Pentagon. What’s more unusual and disturbing, though, is how the adaptability of the Osprey suffered during this long development time. Unlike biological organisms, which when given adequate resources become better adapted through time (or else go extinct), the Osprey became both less well-adapted through the course of twenty-six years of development and less prone to extinction, raking in $25 billion in funding and an eager gaggle of senators and representatives ensuring its ongoing existence.

  “Hot” landing zones are places where enemy fire threatens deployment and evacuation of troops, but the Osprey lost its forward-facing canon during development, leaving it without any ability to provide forward covering fire as it comes in to land. In fact, by the time of deployment, its only armament was a machine gun that could only be operated by a soldier strapped to a safety harness and firing out of the back of the aircraft with the rear cargo door wide open. The complex aerodynamics of the tilt-rotor design also stripped the Osprey of the ability for its huge rotors to “auto-rotate” in the case of engine failure, which would allow for a hard, but survivable, landing. Those same rotors do, however, create such enormous downdrafts that they melt through the decks of navy vessels at sea,24 and in the desert landscapes where they operate now they produce dust storms that make static line drops of soldiers from the air virtually impossible. The whole design creates such instability that pilots need to drastically slow their landing speeds, making them at least as vulnerable as a normal helicopter. Given the complex aerodynamics, twenty years into the program the U.S. Navy eliminated the requirement of “air combat” maneuverability, requiring the Osprey to only have the much lower level of “defensive maneuvering” capabilities. The navy also scrapped the planned protections against nuclear, chemical, and biological fallout. Unlike a helicopter, the Osprey has virtually no visibility, what a critical Pentagon report called “situational awareness,” in the troop compartment, so the independent sensors normally provided by passengers just aren’t there. Crew chiefs, who on a normal helicopter are able to provide information to the pilots about the threat environment, reported that the lack of visibility from an Osprey is its biggest weakness. Finally, the Osprey performs more poorly than any other existing search-and-rescue helicopter at high altitudes, and it’s actually unclear if it can perform its missions at all above 2,000 feet. Altitude wasn’t a problem in Iran, nor was ice, but both are concerns in Afghanistan, and the Osprey can’t handle them.

  Ultimately, the combination of these little compromises led to a near complete compromise in the Osprey’s originally designed mission. In Iraq, Ospreys were confined to the “low threat theater of operations”—basically they ferried troops and equipment around. Even in this relatively tame mission, the Osprey was given the handicapped goal of being “mission capable” 82–87 percent of the time. It failed. At best, in the first year and a half of operations in Iraq, the Osprey was mission capable 68 percent of the time. In part this low reliability was due to constant parts failures. Even though enough parts were sent to supply three times the number of operational Osprey, the surplus of parts was burned through quickly. Several key parts lasted only 10 percent of their expected lifetime, and others could take up to a month to replace. As with natural organisms under extreme resource stress, Osprey crews took to “cannibalizing” other Ospreys for parts.

  At some point, even the Osprey’s congressional shield of invincibility shattered. After hearing top military brass testify about the supposed successes of the Osprey and independent military analysts give more sober reports—including an analysis showing that an Osprey rescuing twenty-four people from an embassy could travel only 60 miles before needing refueling, compared to 400 miles for a normal helicopter—Rep. Edolphus
Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, called for the extinction of the Osprey, saying, “It’s time to put Osprey out of its misery.”

  By contrast, another weapon borne out of the military bureaucracy, “Stanley,” is a modified Volkswagen SUV filled with jury-rigged cameras, radars, motion detectors, and erector-set–like controls of its steering and gear shifting that can safely navigate through complex environments it has never seen before without any human intervention. Stanley was the best of several successful solutions for the challenge of creating a fully autonomous military vehicle. It cost only a few million dollars to produce and was completed just a few years after the initial call for designs.

  It would be completely unfair to compare Stanley and the Osprey in head-to-head competition. Producing a combat-ready aircraft that can fly like both a helicopter and an airplane is a much more complex mission than making an autonomous terrestrial vehicle. But in making this comparison, I am much more concerned with the process of how the weapon systems were created than the end products themselves.

  Unlike the Osprey, Stanley was built in response to an open public call by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for designs to solve a simple and clearly stated “Grand Challenge.” There was a modest $1 million prize offered for the wining entrant, barely enough to cover the likely costs of development, and nowhere near the billions of dollars assured to the contractor for the Osprey. Nonetheless, this call resulted in over 100 entries, mostly from university engineering departments motivated by the professional challenge and the potential prestige that the winner would accrue.

  But prestige was hardly the buzzword surrounding the first entrants into the Grand Challenge. In the first year, all of the competing entrants failed their task. News reports tinged with bemused mockery outlined the various ways in which different vehicles veered off course, accelerated full force into large objects, caught on fire, or just sat motionless at the starting line, overwhelmed with possibility.25

  Fortunately, instead of labeling the challenge a failure, DARPA simply ran the challenge again, even upping the prize to $2 million the next year. Entrants in this second Grand Challenge learned from the big mistakes and the small successes of the first generation. Repeat challengers went back to their labs to eliminate the former and replicate the latter. Teams also learned through interaction with the other teams—sharing information and surreptitiously cribbing good ideas. Whole new ideas emerged from new entrants. By the second year, these independent problem solvers produced a number of successful designs, including Stanford University’s Stanley, an inappropriately blue-painted Volkswagen Touareg (a close match to Stanford’s school color, cardinal red, was already taken by another team) that tore up the course faster than any other team. DARPA then kept the adaptational pathway open by offering more complex challenges.

  A famous old Volkswagen ad juxtaposes Stanley’s ancestor, the Beetle, with the original Apollo lunar lander under the tagline, “It’s ugly but it gets you there.” This slogan could apply to that ugly ocean sunfish, the Mola mola, and countless other species in nature. Good designs in nature aren’t designed at all. Rather, they use an adaptable organizational structure and some feedback from nature to solve the problem at hand. Switching our security strategy from one that designs solutions to one that continually adapts solutions as the environment changes is a radical departure, but one that is already being adopted.

  How do we do this? It is ironic that the lesson to be learned from this military operation is to move away from giving orders and toward providing challenges. Orders tend to assume there is one solution to a problem that everyone must follow to solve the problem. Challenges are posed with the assumption that there are many potential solutions to a problem and that the more people involved, the more likely we are to find a really outstanding solution.

  Challenges essentially create the same three features of adaptable organizations seen in the natural systems. They bring in multiple problem solvers with diverse skills and perspectives. Because respondents to challenges are small localized groups and individuals, challenges encourage these multiple agents to work on very specialized problems and sub-problems as they arise, rather than trying to solve a much larger conglomerated security issue. And finally, because challenges exert little central control beyond the initial problem statement, preconceived notions of how things are done are essentially thrown to the wind with the challenge statement itself. Participants can use any method they think appropriate to solve the challenge.

  There is no reason the DARPA Grand Challenge model can’t be adopted for other societal challenges. In fact, it ’s already happening. As a marine ecologist, I have spent enough time with fishermen to know that they are deeply skeptical of government agencies trying to regulate their livelihoods—constantly ordering the fishermen to do different things and use different gear to reduce their environmental impact. They rightly believe that as the people who continually work on the ocean, they know considerably more about how best to fish than bureaucrats and their computer models. Nonetheless, even fishermen acknowledge that bycatch (all the species accidentally caught in fishing gear that can’t be sold as part of the main target catch) is a huge problem that costs fishermen and hurts the environment. Rather than waiting for a government agency to order fishermen to change their gear or their practices to reduce bycatch, the World Wildlife Fund proposed a challenge—open to all fishermen, environmentalists, backyard inventors, really anyone—to come up with better bycatch reduction devices that could be cheaply and easily used by fishermen. With a small but significant $30,000 cash prize and a chance to take control of their fishing efforts rather than be told what to do, many fishermen (as well as backyard inventors and concerned citizens) jumped at the challenge, which has now been repeated for several years running,26 with several successful innovations appearing each year.

  Challenges have also appeared recently to solve long-standing mathematical challenges, to figure out why Toyota cars were suddenly accelerating,27 to develop better ways to clean up oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout,28 and to reunite a found camera with its owner.29

  I would be remiss to close this chapter without acknowledging the one unqualified success in the development of the Osprey. This was an odd political mutation of the Osprey known as the Congressional Tilt-rotor Technology Coalition, whose members cajoled and badgered their congressional colleagues ceaselessly to support ongoing funding of the Osprey program. Not surprisingly, it stems from the one truly decentralized part of the aircraft’s developmental process, which was that its component parts weren’t made in one huge Bell helicopter factory, but by over 2,000 subcontractors in over forty states.30 While this didn’t necessarily improve the survivability of an individual Osprey under enemy fire or harsh environmental conditions, it did ensure the program’s survivability in Congress. Because so many congressional districts had jobs making parts of the Osprey, there was always a congressperson ready to defend the Osprey every time a selective budget axe appeared.

  As a former congressional staffer, I don’t get too judgmental about this stuff; I’ve long ago accepted the selective forces on congresspeople and how it drives their own adaptation—they need to bring jobs and money to their districts to appease the selective forces of voters in November. As a biologist, what I find fascinating about this aspect of the Osprey story is how doling out congressional favors aided the survival of this dodo. It did so by providing many layers of redundancy in the system (if one congressperson didn’t stand up to defend it, there were many others at the ready, and when those others were able to form a group—as they did with the Tilt-rotor Coalition—they became both redundant and robust). Redundancy gets a bad rap in our society, but it’s well embraced in nature for good reason. The next chapter reexamines redundancy—an often maligned concept—as a deeply biological capacity that builds flexibility, creativity, and ultimately, survivability.

  chapter five

  NECESSA
RY REDUNDANCY

  WE TEND TO THINK OF REDUNDANCY as wasteful. The path of industrial progress toward ever greater “efficiency” mercilessly searches for the fastest route from raw materials to marketable product, and that route should never circle back on itself or visit the same place more than the minimum number of times necessary to create the product. Politicians who want to burnish their fiscally responsible credentials bark that they will “go up to [insert relevant capital here] and trim the fat!” And the latest corporate term for eliminating jobs, “rightsizing,” tries to intimate that a company with the previous higher number of people must necessarily be the wrong size. The people who are fired from their jobs as a result of all this efficiency, fat trimming, and rightsizing are said to have been “made redundant.”

  If redundancy is so wasteful, why is it so common in the natural world, where organisms are constantly struggling to obtain even the minimum resources needed to survive? And conversely, if redundancy is so common in nature, which is exceedingly adaptive, does getting rid of redundancy in society make us less adaptable? The answers lie in how nature uses redundancy.

  There is in nature lots of plain old repetitive redundancy. DNA typically contains the code for multiple copies of important genes, which protects against damage to that section of the DNA molecule and serves as a hedge against errors in transcribing the genetic code during cell division. Species like centipedes and millipedes have multiple legs all working on the same issue of locomotion. Many species produce huge numbers of offspring under the probabilistic assumption that only a few will survive to reach their reproductive years.

  This basic pattern of repetition is what Geerat Vermeij calls “unimaginative redundancy.”1 There’s a safety in numbers to having a lot of legs or a lot of babies, but if they are all doing the same job, or are just thrown out into the world with little chance for survival, they can’t do much independent problem solving, the stuff that advances you evolutionarily. But sometimes this is enough. Certainly, just a little bit of repetitive redundancy in something like the financial system would have gone a long way after 9/11—on that day virtually all of the trading infrastructure was held in the World Trade Center towers, and financial markets were crippled for weeks after their collapse. Accordingly, one of the first adaptations of the financial sector after 9/11 was to create simple copies of their cyber infrastructure in multiple locations.