Revenge of Rumsfeld's Fourth Quadrant--Closing the Strait of Hormuz -- Herb Lin - Lawfare

[erronis]

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/revenge-of-rumsfeld-s-fourth-quadrant-closing-the-strait-of-hormuz

Iran's closure of the strait reveals a lack of U.S. operational planning in a foreseeable contingency.

A long and deep analysis on failures and how Rumsfeld's three known and unknowns misses one very important one. Definitely an academic work worth studying.

In my 2021 Lawfare article, "The Fourth Quadrant--the Unknown Knowns," I argued for expanding Donald Rumsfeld's famous knowledge matrix to include a category he conspicuously overlooked. Recall that in a 2002 press briefing about Iraq, Rumsfeld organized knowledge into three useful bins: known knowns (known answers to questions we know are relevant), known unknowns (questions that we know are relevant but for which we do not yet have answers), and unknown unknowns (the true blind spots that we have no reasonable way of anticipating and appear as a total surprise).

My article pointed out that he omitted the fourth quadrant--unknown knowns--things known in some institutional, analytic, or experiential sense that nonetheless fail to inform decision-making when they should. Unknown knowns are not gaps in data; somewhere in the system, their informational content exists. Rather, they arise from human psychological and organizational frailties: wishful thinking, organizational silos, desensitization to repeated warnings, hierarchical filtering, and the seductive comfort of narratives that tell us what we want to hear.

The Trump administration's operational surprise at Iran's recent closure of the Strait of Hormuz offers a stark and deeply instructive illustration of this phenomenon unfolding before our eyes in real time. The crisis reveals a core pathology of unknown knowns: treating a low assessed probability as license to skip preparation. How that pathology operated--and what it cost--is the subject of this article.

. . .

For national security practitioners and policymakers, the lesson is uncomfortable but unavoidable: Failures to prepare for the well-documented risk scenarios can be as disastrous as failures to predict the unpredictable. Dangerous surprises are not only the ones we never imagined. They are also the ones we imagined, documented, modeled, and then quietly stopped preparing for because we convinced ourselves they wouldn't happen. It's not the black swans that are at issue here; it's forgotten and buried canaries from the allegorical coal mine--the ones we acknowledged, filed away, and then failed to keep alive through the disciplined work of maintained readiness.
. . .

[cachukis]

1. When studying a painting, or anything for that matter

it is not just what is in the frame, but what isn't.

[erronis]

2. The case of the dog who didn't bark. The missing and the anomalous are always the most interesting.