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Original Blog can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/rhizomes-in-paradox-to-centers-of-gravity-and-centralized-hierarchies-in-war-b211a92ed23a

This is an excerpt from a design monograph that addresses design, NATO operational planning and Joint planning methodologies (NATO-OPP, JPP, and various service-specific deviations therein). This monograph is pending publication and was produced through the Joint Special Operations University where the author is a design educator (contractor) for the U.S. Special Operations Command. The title of the monograph is: “Disrupting Modern Military Decision-Making: Deconstructing Institutionalized Rituals through Design Synthesis.”

There are two significant biological metaphors used in postmodernism that work off the notions of a ‘tree form’ and ‘the rhizome.’ Both are significant and permeate the natural world, where “root-tree structures grow and multiple in relation to a central guiding and anchoring structure.”[1] The tree form is a centralized hierarchical relationship that metaphorically is the basis of nearly all classification structuring in the curation of knowledge in Western society. The tree (centralized hierarchy) “for nearly two millennia…has been an Aristotelian hierarchical model of concepts divided into mutually exclusive categories.”[2] The centralized hierarchical form, mirroring how a rooted tree grows branches off a central trunk, “is a fundamental intellectual model for much of western thought, stemming originally from Aristotle’s “classic theory of categories”, which in essence propounds that entities are placed into the same category, by rational division, according to an objective assessment of shared characteristics.”[3] Clausewitz would, centuries later during the rise of natural sciences draw from Newtonian physics to adapt a ‘root-tree’ metaphor of ‘gravity’ to apply in a new ‘science of warfare.’ Thus, the COG analysis central to all modern military decision-making endeavors uses a ‘tree form’ mode of organizing reality and warfare.

While the ‘tree form’ model has formed the basis for all scientific classification, taxonomy, bibliographic classification as well as influence nearly all aspects of the modern military form and doctrinal function in war, it has multiple advantages and weaknesses when considered in various types of system settings. ‘Tree form’ logic is “characterized by vertical and fixed linkages [such as levels of war, lines of effort], binary choices [most dangerous, most likely, strength, weakness], and by the linking of the elements only of the same general nature [the sorting and stacking of things into the ‘Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical Environment, and Time’ or PMESII-PT model].”[4] The logic for ‘tree form’ is a form of cognition “in which information, ideas, people, and institutions are ordered hierarchically according to the predecessors and roots…Thus, tree order is an order based on similarity and offers a taxonomy of forms within a category.”[5] Just as centers of gravity use a tree-form logic to create the framework for centralized hierarchical relationships upon which to seek military actions (defend, attack), if a part of a tree is damaged, all extensions from that point onward are damaged or destroyed. COGs are then arranged in yet another tree-form where they correspond to enemy and friendly COGs positioned at various levels of war. NATO-OPP and JPP employ COG analysis prominently to enable the management of all activities, validating a systematic reasoning on how complex reality and warfare are framed for most all western military forces.

Yet complex, adaptive systems do not support purely systematic logic nor do complex systems only express relationships in centralized hierarchical forms. Instead, just as nature features ‘root tree’ metaphors in many organizational relationships from vegetation, wolf packs, and different cloud formations at various altitudes, nature also features rhizomic relationships. Yet the modern military decision-making methodology has nothing to address rhizomes, and strategists, analysts, and planners can only apply a ‘root tree’ construct through COGs, ‘ends-ways-means’, ‘line of effort’, ‘problem-solution systematic learning, and other mathematical, engineering and natural science inspired frameworks.

Complex systems feature both rhizomes and ‘root tree’ relationships, where one might view how Encyclopedia Britannica, a traditional taxi company, the U.S. State Department, and the 75th Ranger Regiment organize and operate as ‘root tree’ examples. Meanwhile, Wikipedia, Uber, and the shadowy hacker group ‘Anonymous’ demonstrate rhizomic properties of organization and action. There are many more military patterns, groups, and expressions of organized violence that seem closer to rhizomic activities than ‘root-tree’ ones, yet the Joint Planning Process and all related decision-making methodologies, doctrine, strategy, and policy appears to exclusively limit modeling to ‘tree-form’ only. The Arab Spring movement organized over modified Twitter applications and smart phones,[6] the divergence and decentralization of Salafi-jihadist terror groups from 2006 onward,[7] similar decentralization and increased organized crime-related violence of Mexican drug cartels since 2011,[8] and Russian state-sponsored bots, trolls, artificial intelligence algorithms with a decentralized approach to deep fakes and disinformation campaigns[9] are all emergent examples of rhizomic activities where there is no centralized hierarchical formation.

The rhizome is, originally found in botany, a “root -like subterranean stem, commonly horizontal in position that usually produces roots below and sends up shoots progressively from the upper surface…with its multiple horizontal roots best [representing] the nature of the relation between [strategy] and the many scientific disciplines to which it is connected.”[10] The rhizome therefore becomes the antithesis of a root-tree construct, where it rejects hierarchical relationships, breaks away from stratifications and categorized totalities (where isolated objects are placed into conceptual bins like how CARVER analyzes targets with independent factors correlating to criticality, accessibility, and so on), and discards any limitation or regulation of emergent connections between system components.

Rhizomes are “non-hierarchical, horizontal multiplicities which cannot be subsumed within a unified structure, whose components form random, unregulated networks in which any element may be connected with any other element.”[11] In a study of the rhizomatic characteristics of the London itinerant boat dwellers (Boaters), Bowles explains: “Boaters’ advocacy organisations spring up, mushroom-like, rhizomes from somewhere underground, to deal with particular threats, before falling apart before hierarchies can be cemented and powers grabbed.”[12] Rhizomes encompass ideas paradoxical to centralized hierarchical forms such as ‘self-organized’, ‘decentralized’, ‘nonlinear’, ‘lacking order’, and ‘irregular’ or ‘asymmetric’- terms often used in complex security challenges.

The rhizome is a metaphor that the military can introduce into strategic design and operational planning where it works to “compare social life to chaotic root structures in which everything is connected to everything else [or has the potential, in an emergent state of becoming in any and all possible connections].”[13] Militaries cannot consider the rhizome something that can be plugged into the CARVER targeting model, assailed with SWOT categorical scrutiny, or rendered into COG analysis. “Rhizomes are not composed of units but of multiple dimensions and directions in motion; as such, there is no beginning, no end, only a middle that grows.”[14] This requires a postmodern war frame for strategists to consider instead of the modern, analytically oriented approach of systematic logic. Bowles, in explaining the rhizomatic London Boaters, stated: “Boaters are proud of how their group is loose, lacking official structure, and often ineffective, just as they are proud of their victories when pressed and threatened. A Boater at the meeting [referred to their collective] as ‘a squiggly wiggly not-quite-democratic thing.’”[15]Many of the latest and most confusing adversaries of recent decades might be more ‘squiggly wiggly’ than susceptible to a ‘center of gravity’ construct; yet defense institutions insist on adhering to doctrinal modes of understanding warfare through one frame only.

The London Boaters provide a useful example of this alternative strategic design concept. “Groups tend to arise in response to threats, act in ways which are either contested by skeptical elements of the community or are non-hierarchically designed so as to avoid this contestation, and then change or disappear in the absence of an immediate goal or a diminishing of the threat that framed their original purpose.”[16] Rhizomatic action “constantly moves along these connections, changing and connecting to ‘other multiplicities’”[17]…which supports the nonlinear and emergent patterns that define complex, adaptive systems where NATO or Joint Forces seek to exercise security activities. This may seem esoteric or even obtuse for military professionals desiring to simplify complex reality so that the mathematical precision of objective isolation can link heroic strategic action in an ‘input-output’ quantifiably measurable manner as modern military strategic design and planning promote. However, complex reality cannot be tamed into some categorical, hierarchical arrangement where objectivity gains a slight edge upon all other aspects of a swirling, transforming and learning system. Pick frames this effectively with:

In some ways, organization cannot be located solely in the real; it is also a social construction and, as such, is part reality and part real. Two things about organization are real: the people who interact with the organization (who are themselves only part real- an unreachable organism and part subject) and the physical containers and spatial dimensions occupied by the organization (e.g. the physical presence of buildings and computers). Of interest now is how the content, form and expression of organization encounter one another and what happens when they encounter the real.[18]

The rhizome removes the very idea of a natural hierarchy, and instead emphasizes the non-linear and non-hierarchical, self-organizing, decentralized and “hyperlinked” environment[19] that military strategists may find more valuable in considering complex security contexts instead of exclusively using ‘tree-form’ concepts such as the COG. In particular, the digital world of today with cyberspace, social media, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, block chains, and other technologically sophisticated manifestations seem far more recognizable through rhizomatic versus COG-oriented models, metaphors and language. Unlike the rigid root-tree form that grows and multiplies “in relation to a central guiding and anchoring structure. The rhizome, on the other hand, is the free, expansive movement of grass, constantly connecting random and infinite points.”[20] Other examples of rhizomes are found in potato tubulars (growing in all directions, without a center), ant colony movements for food foraging, and the constant reorganization of a bird flock in flight. Tree-form organizational structures are indeed strong and vulnerable as COG analysis dictates; kill the alpha male of a wolf pack or the leader of a drug cartel and the organization is disrupted until it replaces leadership. Yet rhizomatic structures continue uninterrupted, no matter where a ‘kill strike’ is attempted across the entire organization. Cutting up certain starfish in the ocean creates many smaller ones.[21]

Lawley provides a valuable warning about potential attempts to submit rhizomes to systematic logic and create a categorical model that formats rhizomatic patterns and permits a comparison and contrast with a COG analysis, stakeholder analysis or utilization in CARVER targeting. The rhizome must remain fluid, in a perpetually emergent state of becoming, where one might illustrate significant qualities and characteristics of rhizomatic behaviors but avoid “any of these becoming the one use and interpretation of the rhizome in the study of organization- to prevent the rhizome from being arborified [rendered into root-tree centralization/vertical hierarchy] such that its own rhizomatic potential as a concept is closed off.”[22] Thus there will not be a graphic, framework or templated model provided in this explanation of the rhizome for strategic design. Instead, strategic designers should also respect the incommensurability of rhizomatic heterogeneous and root-tree homogenous organizational forms and why the constructs of one cannot be imposed on the other. Analysis does not produce synthesis, centralized hierarchical reductionism will describe but not explain, and complex emergence cannot be predicted in linear-causal fashion. With rhizomes, “each element mutually alters the other, and they each become the other in the process. Fixed entities are replaced by an indeterminant middle, and it is in this middle that uniquely new relations and possibilities are continually created.”[23]

The rhizome has already been taken out of postmodern theory and applied in a range of non-military disciplines and fields, including organizational theory, information theory, narrative theory, eastern strategic theory, social media, literature sciences, as well as artificial intelligence and robotics.[24] Originating in biology (first appearance in 1832 in botany) to explain how many plants such as poison ivy, potato tubulars, ferns, ginger, turmeric and other bulbs organize and grow, postmodern philosophy adapted the concept for other non-biological usages in the 1970s. Yet the modern military institution never incorporated rhizomatic concepts in strategic or operational planning methodologies. Instead, western militaries went with a different organizing metaphor also coined in 1832, when Marie von Brühl published the posthumous military work of Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz introduced Prussian military theorists to “the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act” as the ‘center of gravity.’[25]

The COG is a Newtonian physics metaphor lifted from natural science for assimilation into framing a modern ‘science of military activities’. Yet the COG enables military strategists and analysts to approach warfare cast in an interpretation of reality where all battles (conducted anywhere, everywhere, forever forward and backwards in time and space) hold to a fundamental organizing logic that ultimately is in ‘root-tree’ form. American military forces would not introduce Clausewitzian thinking until after the Vietnam War, yet despite both rhizomes and COGs being available and equally accessible academically, rhizomes are absent in all mainstream military theory.[26]

Cyberspace, computer network development, and how the worldwide web grows and creates knowledge are currently being explored through rhizomatic constructs. In these technological developments, what was once a centralized hierarchical formation of information understood in classical Aristotelian structuring “has dissolved, replaced by something more amorphous, if more creative.”[27] People several decades ago would use the card catalog system (invented by Melvil Dewey in 1876) that used the ‘root-tree’ construct to organize book locations in a library with vertical and fixed linkages of relative location and relative index, arranged in linear alphabetical ordering. Yet today, performing a Google search or Wikipedia is not only faster, but occurs rhizomatically instead of through the classical centralized hierarchical ‘tree form.’ There is a shift in pattern prioritization from ‘collecting what is significant through reductionist linkages’ to ‘connecting to as wide a web of information as possible’ where any and every path connects the entire network in an infinite dense and ever-changing web.[28] Thus, analytical optimization (preferred in simple and complicated systems) is dissolved, so that synthesis and divergent thinking generates novelty and holistic appreciation in complex (or chaotic) systems.

Rhizome philosophy, if applied to a security context would feature the following principles that aid in defining a rhizomatic state of becoming, but not a categorization model that strategists might plug data into so that rhizomatic predictive outputs occur formulaically. First, such a model requires any part of a rhizome system to connect to any other part. There is complete lack of hierarchy. “It is anti-hierarchical, but all of its parts are, and most be connected,”[29] implying that all manner of COG analytical modeling is also irrelevant. Rhizomes consist only of lines and are devoid of points that can be thought of in where a branch meets the trunk of a tree, or a linkage node that supports a hierarchical arrangement. This means that rhizomes are pure expressions of multiplicity while COGs and tree-root forms express centric (single center) or polycentric (multiple centers) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established routes.[30] Deleuze and Guattari apply a geographic metaphor of ‘plateau’ to differentiate rhizomes from tree-root forms where the rhizome is only made up of plateaus. “A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or end.”[31]

The rhizome experiences damage or ‘rupture’ differently than centralized hierarchical forms. One can target and shatter part of a rhizome in one particular spot, but it will start up again either along an already established line or generate a novel line in an unexpected, different direction. There are two more qualities of rhizomatic philosophy addressed with ‘cartography’ and ‘decalcomania.’ These can be explained with the idea of maps and mapping. Decalcomania originally came from how printing techniques transfer concepts from the original to other materials and has been shortened to ‘decal’ in modern usage. Yet decalcomania offers unusual properties to include fractalization. The postmodern adaptation of this concept for rhizomes is that the rhizomatic organization is the map, and not the tracing. The tracing of a map (or what becomes the decal) is a copy of the original, and still not the actual source nor a complete capture of the original thing. Further, the decal is fixed, rigidly adhering to the requirement to remain an approximation of that which permitted decalcomania to occur. The map, however, is open and in postmodern rhizomatic theory, is “connectable in all dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, and subject to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, and reworked by an individual, group or social formation.”[32]

In a military consideration, where groups have radically transformed ideas or movements to emergent advantage despite a departure away from the meaning of the original movement itself applies as rhizomatic. Violent Jihadism transformed rhizomatically from particular origins in the 1950s in the Muslim Brotherhood ideological and political stances of Sayyid Qutb and ‘Milestones’[33] to contemporary Islamist and Jihadist movements, with the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledging Osama bin Laden’s worldview as heavily influenced and inspired by Qutb’s earlier ideas.[34] The transformation of the Cold War created ‘Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- People’s Army from a Marxist-Leninist peasant guerrilla group fighting anti-imperialism to a modern and powerful drug cartel and kidnapping organization in the 1980s, to a disarmed political party with representatives in Colombian Congress since 2018.

Hezbollah’s rhizomatic journey from post-1979 Iranian Revolution as a state-sponsored terror group using suicide attacks, bombings, terrorism, and militia training to a special operations entity unlike most other groups branded ‘state proxy appendage’. Hezbollah today expresses sophisticated special-operations capabilities, operates often autonomously from Iranian formal oversight, nurtures cult-like ideological fanaticism to grow and maintain members, and is an international drug cartel and black-market operator among numerous other forms and abilities.[35] There are clear security entities and patterns of complex violence within NATO or Joint Forces purview that might be understood through strategic design with rhizomes instead of centralized hierarchical models alone.

The concept of a rhizome for complex security decision-making consideration is one of disruptive and deconstructive capability toward the current NATO-OPP/JPP decision-making framework. Not all organizations, groups or the relationships within a network are expressed in ‘root-tree’ or linear, Newtonian physics based metaphoric devices. Those parts of complex reality that have “a form of existence that tends toward the unstructured, the free-flowing, and towards flat, egalitarian structures [are the very ones] that state-form organisations find hard to grasp.”[36] The rhizome concept expresses through postmodern philosophy, which may be off-putting for those demanding all strategic thinking be actioned exclusively through a single war paradigm that seeks pseudo-scientific adaptations of natural science language, models and metaphors. Yet “strategy is an experiential area where philosophy matters.”[37] The rhizome is “an acentered, non-hierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states.”[38] Yet Robinson and McGuire offer important warning for adventurous strategists or analysts seeking to fuse together rhizomes into another social framework for decision-making, such as grafting a rhizomatic model or step into the Joint Planning Process or into NATO-OPP:

The prospect of linking together non-hierarchical and traditional systems- the rhizome and the tree- seem on the face of it to be a promising objective for the practical situation. We should perhaps be concerned, however that we are “bolting together” concepts from very different philosophical backgrounds- perhaps even inadvertently trying to integrate realist and non-realist positions… before the rhizome concept can be absorbed as a standard model for understanding information organisation, and other aspects of the information sciences, much more study, both of its philosophical basis and practical applicability, will be needed.[39]

NATO and Joint Forces ought not to retain the overarching systematic, reductionist frame of the modern military decision-making paradigm and attempt to insert a step where the rhizome is rendered into a formula similar to how COG analysis, SWOT or CARVER occurs. If the rhizome is applied, it must be done so without violating the core principles of what make the rhizomatic becoming explained earlier in this section unique to rhizomes and not tree-forms. This means that much of modern doctrine including language, models, and those theoretical underpinnings the models require are incompatible and even paradoxical to rhizomatic philosophical constructs. Yet advocates of this postmodern idea such as Naveh, Graicer, and students of the Israeli original ‘systemic operational design’ community of practice have used rhizomatic themes and concepts in multiple military endeavors since the 1990s.

Pick supports this stance by offering: “We must accept the limitations of our current modes of representation and expression and rethink how we illuminate the multiplicity of complex, contemporary forms of organization in accessible ways… We thus find that we are thinking not about organization itself but the tracks it leaves behind: footprints, scats, fragments of past meals. By working the seam… we can begin to illuminate the flux and flow between form (configuration), content (constructed realities), expressions (tests), and substance (the real);”[40] in doing so, modern military forces have the opportunity to focus their enterprise in a different way that engages with complex, dynamic security contexts in ways legacy modes of decision-making was incapable of. This points to not a single future, but to the emergence of multiple futures so that complexity is thought of outside and beyond the legacy military framework of systematic logic.

This excerpt is part of a larger monograph pending publication in 2022.

For more, follow Ben Zweibelson, subscribe to ‘Think JSOU’ on YouTube, consider JSOU courses, research and educational outreach by visiting https://www.jsou.us , and also connect with Ben on LinkedIn to learn more about this monograph and the planned publication in 2022.