Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil153
That's not obvious at all, it needs to be shown. And it's only true for certain things. For example, the military is one example of something that works far better when centralized.
Centralized military control is no longer something that works far better than decentralized control primarily as a result of globalization. This will be especially more relevant in the future. Open source/decentralized insurgencies/militaries are able to iterate their decision making processes much faster than a centralized bureaucracy can, such as the Pentagon. For the Pentagon, this means that the mental constructs used to orient oneself to the environment slowly cease to approximate the actual global environment. When this happens, only bad things can end up happening. For example, the military success that has happened as a result of the Surge in Iraq has been primarily the result of open-sourcing the counter-insurgency to the Anbar Awakening.
Quote:
Crisis response management is another.
That must be while cities all over the globe are developing their own infrastructures to deal with
crises.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
No, Phil is pretty much right. When you are going to put people under extreme amounts of pressure and strain (not that all military personell has proper operative duties, maybe 10% of them or so - but we can pretend we talk about them) a centralized and strong command is necessary.
When speed becomes an issue in such organizations, then size will become a liability - but instead of decentralizing you move the operative command closer to the ground personell but you keep the administrative and responsibility of command system in place. Typical examples are firefighting, rescue services, police operations and small unit tactics in military operations.
Now, we can have varying opinions on whether these organizations does anything GOOD - maybe you even think they do horrible bad things.
But that doesn't mean they don't do what they're supposed to do well.
The last 30 years of American military strategy go against you here. The rise of Maneuver Warfare has signaled a trend towards the decentralization of military command. Without a centralized command in Maneuver Warfare, units are able to constantly probe the enemies defenses and exploiting any weakness they find. Instead of focusing on specific locations or buildings to occupy, you allow the ground fighters to simply find certain enemy control nodes and destroy them, giving them very wide decision making powers. As far as pressure and strain go, whats the point of training officers to make decisions under combat situation if you aren't going to allow it to happen? With the advent of 4th generation warfare that we are currently seeing the world today, this trend towards decentralization of military decision making will only continue.
