Explore and exploit

About a year ago, while watching something, I heard the word “disfigure”. My mind immediately went looking for an alliterative companion and landed on “discover”. Following that thread a little further, I came up with another pair: “explore and exploit”. Why I was doing any of this is a mystery to me, and most of the thought process is quite foggy now. But somewhere along the way, I found myself thinking about militaries.

“Discover and disfigure” sounds awfully close to what militaries do in warfare, doesn’t it? Find a target, learn about it, and use that knowledge to damage or destroy it. There’s much more to their work than that, of course, but so much effort goes into understanding something well enough to ruin it.

Then there’s “explore and exploit”. Exploration leaves open what we’re going to do with what we find. “Exploit” sounds less promising, but as a software developer, I’m tempted to borrow from cybersecurity here. Exploiting a vulnerability means taking advantage of a weakness in a system. That can certainly be destructive. But malicious software can have weaknesses too. Finding one might let you stop it from working. You’d be exploiting a vulnerability to protect yourself against an attack.

A military could use what it learns in much the same way. Finding weaknesses in another country’s weapons or tactics could help it work out how to counter an attack. Understanding a weapon’s limitations, for example, might reveal a way to prevent it from reaching its target. With that defensive purpose in mind, “explore and exploit” offers a counterpart to “discover and disfigure”: using what we learn about others’ vulnerabilities to protect ourselves.

And I think keeping people safe should guide how militaries use the knowledge they gather. I’d love to see more of their ingenuity devoted to finding ways to counter attacks and limit the harm they can cause. Defending yourself sometimes requires fighting back, of course. But I think we all stand to gain more in the long run from learning to cooperate. How to make that cooperation last is a difficult question, and I don’t pretend to have an answer. I do think it’s worth working toward.

Anyway, I hope you found that little connection as interesting as I did! I certainly wasn’t expecting a search for words that sound nice together to leave me thinking about what militaries should be doing.