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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
September, 2003
1. INTRODUCTION
In response to reader request, this month's edition looks at military
applications of I-O-C, which is the sociological model that underpins
dark age theory. It also provides a survey of dark ages throughout
history and around the world. This follows on from the July edition of
the newsletter, which included a piece specifically on Europe's
post-Roman dark age.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson
2. MILITARY APPLICATIONS OF I-O-C
I-O-C stands for Integration-Organisation-Cohesion, and these represent
the three distinct spheres of human interaction. In essence,
integration refers to the political side of life, organisation to the
economic, and cohesion to the social-cultural. That is to say, taking
the political first, if a society has strong leaders who are effective
at imposing their authority on the other members of the society, then
the society is said to be highly integrated or to possess a high degree
of integration. High integration is associated with certain
characteristic features, such as peace and order. Low integration is
associated with the opposite. On the economic side, if the members of a
society are divided into numerous specialist occupations who trade
vigorously with each other, the society is said to be highly organised
or to possess a high degree of organisation. IMPORTANT NOTE: When we
say that the society is 'organised' we don't mean that someone in
particular has come along and organised it-organisation is an overall
property of the society resulting from the micro-interactions of its
individual members. High organisation is associated with things like
wealth and a high rate of innovation, while low organisation
(corresponding to self-sufficiency and lack of economic diversity) is
associated with poverty and technological stagnation. Finally, on the
social-cultural side, if the members of a society share a common set of
values and are intensely loyal to the society, the society is said to
be highly cohesive or to possess a high degree of cohesion.
All this is of interest to dark age theory because a dark age can then
be defined as a time of extremely low integration, organisation and
cohesion, and the whole drama of history can be abstracted as the saga
of fluctuations in integration, organisation and cohesion. Dark age
theory goes further into the interactions between integration,
organisation and cohesion, and how and why they tend to fluctuate, but
I won't discuss that here. Instead, I am going to talk about military
applications of I-O-C, based on my experience of consulting to the UK
MOD.
Most obviously, I-O-C can be used to structure intelligence assessments
of particular countries. It is useful to know where a nation fares in
the integration-organisation-cohesion stakes for two reasons. Firstly,
it gives an indication of that society's historical trajectory. If you
look at how a country's I-O-C has been changing in the recent past, and
you know where the I-O-C is now, then, with an understanding of the
dynamic behaviour of integration, organisation and cohesion, you can
have some idea of the kinds of issue that that society will have to
face in the years ahead. In other words you gain an insight into such
things as its foreign policy agenda, and its economic and diplomatic
performance. Secondly, I-O-C gives you an appreciation of a society's
strengths and weaknesses, and that is important information if it is
your enemy (or indeed your ally), and again with I-O-C theory you have
some insight into the best areas to target say as part of a psyops
(psychological operations) campaign. The advantage of I-O-C over
existing methods is that it is largely formal and objective, and
furthermore it is rooted in five thousand years of historical
experience. This is all I will say on that subject.
A quite different area where I-O-C can be applied to the military is in
assessing the readiness states of one's own armed forces. At its most
abstract, I-O-C is a measure of collective performance. In dark age
theory, one could say that I-O-C is used to describe the collective
performance of say the Roman Empire-when the Roman Empire had high
I-O-C scores, it was at its peak; when I-O-C diminished, the Empire
declined and disappeared, or in other words the Roman collective
performance faltered. Translating the I-O-C concepts into issues more
familiar from the military context, one can say firstly that
integration is about the commander's ability to impose a common intent
on his force. If the commander is effective at formulating and
disseminating a common intent, via the planning/orders cycle, then one
can say that the formation is well integrated. If he does not succeed
in imposing a common intent, the formation will be considered poorly
integrated. Secondly, organisation is about the division of labour
within the formation or military team. In a well organised formation,
there are various specialists occupying different roles-e.g.
fighter/bomber, artillery/infantry, or ops officer/logs officer-and
they function together in a complementary manner with no gaps,
overlaps, bottlenecks or underutilisation. In a poorly organised team,
by contrast, the individuals are jacks of all trades, relying on
themselves, doing many tasks and not being very good at any of them.
Thirdly, cohesion refers to the level of commitment and loyalty that
individual members show towards the team.
Obviously, integration, organisation and cohesion measure things that
are pertinent to collective performance. A team characterised by a
common intent, an efficient division of labour and a high degree of
loyalty and commitment will, in general, prove more operationally
effective than one that does not have these things. Having said this,
I-O-C is not the only thing bearing on operational effectiveness.
Individual performance-such as the ability to shoot straight or to
devise tactically appropriate plans-is also relevant. However, I-O-C
offers a clear and precise way of capturing the phenomenon of teamwork
or collective performance, which has traditionally been regarded as
largely intangible and unquantifiable, in contrast to individual
performance.
The above then has explained how, in general terms, I-O-C is relevant
to assessing military readiness. The crucial question is how you
actually measure the I-O-C of a military formation and what you can do
with the information. I can't go into full details here, but to give
the flavour of it take the example of integration. Integration measures
the extent to which the commander imposes a common intent on the force.
Integration can therefore be defined differently as the probability
that the activity of any given element of the formation lies within the
commander's intent. In fact, you don't need to look at the element's
activity continuously, but only at changes in the element's behaviour,
which occur at decision points. Integration therefore becomes the
probability that any given decision reflects the commander's intent. In
practice, it is impossible to monitor every single decision, and
therefore you sample a small set of decisions, assuming them to be
representative of the whole. Then if you find, say, that 80 percent of
the decisions within your sample reflect the commander's intent, this
implies that the formation has an integration of 80 percent. That is
the basis of it. A similar approach is used for organisation and
cohesion.
With this method of measuring a formation's I-O-C, one can look, for
example, at the improvement in collective performance that comes from
training and exercising. This makes it possible to start answering
long-standing questions about how much benefit the military gets from
formation-level training, in contrast to other ways of investing its
money, such as buying more tanks. To do that, it is necessary to know
what performance improvement comes from having a given level of
integration, organisation and cohesion. Again, I cannot go into great
detail here, but the flavour of it, again with respect to integration
as an example, is as follows. If the team is integrated, with all the
elements working to a common purpose, the capabilities of the different
elements reinforce each other-e.g. the artillery provides indirect fire
on obstacles created by the engineers, in order to give the enemy a
very difficult time. If the elements are working to different purposes,
so that say the fire plan is unrelated to the engineer plan, then these
capabilities do not reinforce and may even cancel each other out, thus
giving the enemy a much easier time. In short, integration increases
the degree to which the formation's capabilities will reinforce each
other and hence the probability of mission success against a given
enemy. These ideas can be incorporated into operational analysis models
so as to predict performance and also to conduct balance of investment
analyses.
3. DARK AGES-A RECURRENT AND GLOBAL PHENOMENON
Europe's post-Roman dark age is not unique. I will show that dark ages
have occurred throughout history and all across the world, but first
let us briefly take some historical bearings. Traditionally, Rome is
supposed to have been founded in 753 BC, though it was not until
400-300 BC that it began to emerge as a significant force in the
Italian peninsula. In this respect, it was a relative latecomer. For
the civilisation of pharaonic Egypt was founded in 3100 BC, and the
world's first ever cities were founded several hundred years before
that in Iraq.
Egypt was united under a single central government, but Iraq was
characterised by a number of independent states joined together in a
federal structure. The latter region, which extended into Syria, is
sometimes called Mesopotamia. This traditional name, meaning
'between-the-rivers', is based on the fact that the lands where this
civilisation flourished lay between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. I
prefer to use the countries' modern names.
The first dark age known to history occurred in Egypt around 2200 BC.
It is known as the first intermediate period and lasted about 25 to 50
years. It is a dark age because its history is very confused and there
are few records from the time. No new palaces or temples were built.
There were repeated famines. Trade dwindled. The texts that we do have
describe every kind of social disruption. Peasants had to carry weapons
when they worked in the fields. There was a rapid turnover of pharaohs,
with each one reigning barely longer than a year. At the same time, the
wealth and power of the pharaohs declined, and in the provinces various
individuals set themselves up as independent rulers who fought among
themselves.
This picture that we have of Egypt's first intermediate period is
therefore very similar to the one we have of Britain's post-Roman dark
age-i.e. economic breakdown and political disorder, along with a marked
reduction in historical and archaeological remains.
Egypt experienced a second intermediate period around 1700 BC, which
was again characterised by civil unrest, problems with the food supply,
and general confusion and obscurity. During this dark age, which lasted
one or two centuries, Egypt was invaded by a people referred to as the
Hyksos. Just like the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, this was a
highly significant but highly mysterious episode. We do not really have
any idea as to who the Hyksos were, where they came from, what they
did, or where they went.
Finally, around 1100 BC, Egypt entered a third intermediate period.
This was not quite so dark as the earlier dark ages, but it lasted on
and off for some four hundred years, with some periods being darker
than the rest. During this era, parts of the kingdom occasionally broke
away under rival dynasties and sharp rises in food prices show that
there were problems with the economy.
These Egyptian dark ages had counterparts among other ancient
societies. In particular, the Egyptian first intermediate period was
part of a much wider dark age affecting the whole of the middle east.
At this time, the cities of Syria and Iraq were at war among themselves
and were also being plundered by barbarian outsiders. The region's
archaeological record becomes very thin, and building, writing and art
all seem to have ceased.
The third intermediate period coincided with similar retrenchment not
only in the middle east but also among the civilised societies that had
now sprung up around the shores of the Mediterranean, i.e. among the
Hittites and Mycenaeans. The first of these people were based in what
is now Turkey. The Hittites had risen to prominence from about 1800 BC
onwards, when they began to conquer the lands to their south. Around
1500 BC, they had experienced a peculiar dark age of their own, lasting
about fifty years. During that time, the empire broke up but it was
later restored under new kings. The dark age that began in 1100 BC,
i.e. at the same time as Egypt's third intermediate period, completely
wiped out Hittite civilisation in its Turkish heartland. A few
centuries later, though, a new society of people calling themselves
Hittites emerged in Syria. These are the Hittites mentioned in the
Bible.
The Mycenaean civilisation was based in Greece. It is named for its
most important city at Mycenae. These Mycenaean Greeks are the ones who
are supposed to have fought the Trojan war described by Homer. Around
the time of the Egyptian third intermediate period, their civilisation
collapsed and disappeared. The details are vague, but the ruined
palaces of Mycenae show evidence of burning, and therefore of violent
disorder. Greece's ensuing dark age is one of the darkest in history
and lasted four hundred years. Later Greek myths refer to it as a time
of warrior heroes, suggesting that it was characterised by the usual
warlordism. Writing and urbanism vanished from the peninsula, while
archaeology has little to tell us.
The people who founded Greece's classical civilisation, with its heroes
like Socrates and Aristotle, were not related to their Mycenaean
predecessors. The classical Greeks arrived during the dark age as part
of something called the Dorian migration. Again like the Anglo-Saxons
in Britain, they came to their new land in a mysterious manner. Around
800 BC they began to pull Greece out of the dark age, and by 500 BC the
classical city states, such as Sparta, Athens and Corinth, were fully
flourishing.
Arguably, Rome could be said to have risen out of a dark age that
previously existed on the Italian peninsula. Thus, the main power in
northern and central Italy before Rome belonged to the Etruscan people.
Their origin is obscure, but the Etruscans are believed to have
migrated from the east. Their civilisation began to emerge about 1000
BC, and was in full flower by 800 to 700 BC. The Etruscans' wealth was
based on mining and maritime trade, and for a time they were a
significant naval power. Then, around the end of the sixth century BC,
Etruria went into decline. This is shown by a drastic reduction in
archaeological remains. Etruscan tombs, which had once been lavishly
decorated, became poorer and meaner, and there were far fewer of them.
These so-called Italic middle ages lasted for some 150 years, i.e.
until about 350 BC. Etruscan architecture then picked up again and
prosperity returned. However, Rome was now also growing in strength,
and its destiny was to conquer and absorb the Etruscan civilisation,
which it did in 89 BC.
I will finish this survey of dark ages by turning further afield, to
the examples of China and ancient America.
In China, civilisation is traditionally said to have begun around 1600
BC with the rise of the Shang dynasty. By 1000 BC, this gave way to the
Chou dynasty, one of the high spots of Chinese history. Yet by 750 BC,
the Chou dynasty was in decline, and China entered what are known as
its Spring-Autumn and Warring States periods. These constitute a
long-five hundred years-though not particularly deep dark age. The
country was fragmented into petty tyrannies, which were forever at war,
and the course of events is difficult to unravel.
In 221 BC, a new dynasty, that of the Ch'in, reunited and pacified
China. However, over the next thousand years or so, the country
experienced a series of short dark ages, sometimes known as the first,
second and third partitions. These began in AD 221, c. AD 350 and AD
906, respectively. The first and third lasted about fifty years each.
The middle one lasted much longer at a little over two hundred years.
None of these dark ages was as severe as those of say post-Roman
Britain or post-Mycenaean Greece. Nevertheless, in each case, the
central state lost control and the countryside dissolved into
continuous fighting.
In pre-Columbian America, the same pattern emerges. The Aztecs of
Mexico and the Incas of Chile/Peru-i.e. the peoples who were in the
ascendant when the conquistadors arrived-were just the latest of a
series of societies in their respective regions. They had each arisen
out of earlier dark ages.
In South America, there was initially a flourishing civilisation based
on the cities of Huari and Tiahuanaco. Around AD 1000 these cities were
abandoned, and it was not until two hundred years later that a new
civilisation, the Chimu empire, arose in the same region. Between the
fall of Huari-Tiahuanaco and the rise of the Chimu, the archaeological
trail goes cold. In other words, it is a dark age. The Chimu empire was
conquered by the Incas around 1450.
In the Valley of Mexico, the city of Teotihuacan was the dominant power
around AD 900. Yet for some reason this city was abandoned and, as had
happened in South America, there then followed a two century dark age.
It was during this dark age that the Aztecs first migrated to the
valley, in a shadowy process that reminds us yet again of the
Anglo-Saxons' arrival in Britain.
In North America, the first Europeans did not discover any extant
civilisation. However, they did discover the remains of one. These were
the 'Indian mounds' of the Mississippi region, which for a long time
explorers could not believe were the work of the rather primitive local
inhabitants. It is now known that there had been a more advanced
culture in the Mississippian region, which collapsed some fifty years
before Columbus's first voyage. In effect, this part of North America
was in a dark age when Europeans arrived.
There had been another society, that of the Hopewell culture, which had
existed in the same region somewhat earlier and had been at the centre
of trade routes reaching across the south-eastern United States. The
Hopewell culture had also constructed earthworks and shared other
features with the later Mississippian society. However, the Hopewell
culture, which arose around 100 BC, died out around AD 400, but the
Mississippian culture did not arise until AD 700. Between the two lies
a three hundred year dark age.
Dark ages then constitute a genuine phenomenon, one that has occurred
repeatedly through history. They are characterised above all by their
obscurity. During such periods, the historical record goes almost
completely silent. There are few contemporary inscriptions or
documents, and not much in the way of building or other material
remains. Dark ages are missing chapters in the human story.
This obscurity is connected to the fact that dark ages are times of
trouble, conflict and warlordism. At the same time commerce dwindles
and may die out altogether. These things evidently go hand in hand. It
is difficult to run a business amidst widespread fighting. The people
who live under such conditions also have more pressing concerns than
building monuments and producing written accounts of their times.