Helping out a Military Man

Was at the CDM (College of Defence Management) in Secunderabad a couple of weeks ago to give a talk to the student officers there on primary data collection methods.

The talk went rather well. Here's an email I received from one of the student officers there. I've anonymized the name to "PS" but the rest is as is.

Sir,

First of all let me congratulate you for educating us on primary data collection methods at the College of defence Mgt, Secunderabad on 26 Jul 14. As a participant offr, undergoing the Higher Defence Mgt Course at the College, I must admit that lots of doubts lingering in our minds on constructs and questionnaire design got clarified after the talk. All the participants were very enthusiastic which was evident from the huge applause and brisk clapping at the end of the talk. Thank you very much.

Sir, my dissertation topic is ‘Space Warfare and Military Strategy’ and the draft hypothesis on which I am working on is “Weaponisation of space in the south Asian context is inevitable”.

Sir, in your pre-lunch interaction, you had mentioned about certain tools which are available on open source for hypothesis testing on such subjects. While I am in the process of preparing a questionnaire for circulating it amongst the participant officers, I would request you to kindly guide me on the issue.

PS

The following is my response.

Hi PS,

Pls call me Sudhir. I am happy for the opportunity to give talks at the CDM and interact with folks like you.

Re your thesis topic, some of my first impressions:

>> Sir, my dissertation topic is ‘Space Warfare and Military Strategy’ and the draft hypothesis on which I am working on is “Weaponisation of space in the south Asian context is inevitable”.

Before drafting hypotheses, its critically important to define the phenomena of interest (upon which your constructs will eventually be based). What do we mean by 'space warfare'? By 'weaponization'? Even by 'south asia' given that space is a, well, global game and we're looking at it with regional lenses?

Once you have built your definitions (and these could be with the help of (i) existing literature, (ii) expert commentary or agreement and/or (iii) context specific understanding), you can start generating ideas for plausible hypotheses.

E.g., define thresholds - level 1 of space militarization is surveillance capability deployment of upto 1 m resolution on target countries, level 2 is so-and-so and so on. Pretty much like how in the IAF you have third, fourth and fifth gen planes and so on based on certain criteria.

By defining levels, generations or other thresholds, you are able to use these constructs directly in your hypothesis construction.

By the way, all this is illustrative only. I have no idea about space weaponization at all.

>> Sir, in your pre-lunch interaction, you had mentioned about certain tools which are available on open source for hypothesis testing on such subjects.

Well, I was referring to text analytic tools that are readily available on open source R statistical platform. So if you have a large body of written material - journal articles, research reports, press reports, expert interview transcripts etc on the subject of your study, you can condense the text to extract meaningful themes from it.

I intend to conduct a workshop with interested CDM faculty where I will share methods and code for text analytics (among other things) with the faculty there. My understanding is that they in turn will pass on the how-to of text analytics to you.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Sudhir