Recommended Reading & Viewing
Top Billing! Information Dissemination (Chris Rawley) –Putting Major Naval Powers at Risk with Irregular Warfare
Like the opening moves on a hundred million square kilometer chess board, great and smaller naval powers have once again begun to maneuver for Indian Ocean and Western Pacific naval infrastructure. The Southeast Asian underdogs in this match are outgunned and outspent so creativity is the order of the day. As various nations modernize and build up combat forces in the Pacific, it is worthwhile to examine alternatives to conventional naval power which could be used to thwart any real or perceived PRC threat. For an illustration of this creativity using irregular warfare, see this article penned by NWC Professor James R. Holmes analyzing an idea to establish a Vietnamese naval militia in order to defend the Paracels. Here, J. Noel Williams suggests another alternative to a new bilateral naval arms race. ….
Abu Muqawama (Dan Trombly) –Twilight of the Carriers?
…. Simply looking at carriers ability to dispense aerial firepower, however, is insufficient to understanding their value. Carriers project power, not just firepower. Bombers can support troops in contact in Afghanistan, sure, but Afghanistan isn’t exactly the height of the A2/AD challenge (and you can see plenty of F/A-18s providing airstrikes there too). Indeed, with the exception of landlocked countries, anywhere that the U.S. is providing close air support to American troops in contact, it will likely have a naval presence nearby. Indeed, if access to theater basing for tactical aircraft is diminishing, than projecting a ground presence into an area is more, not less, likely to necessitate a carrier. Carrier Battle Groups will likely need to integrate their operations more with strategic bombers and tactical aircraft, to confront A2/AD challenges, but for some kinds of crisis response, strategic bombers likely won’t cut it.
HNN (Daniel Lord Smail) –History Meets Neuroscience
A neurohistory is a new kind of history, operating somewhere near the intersection of environmental history and global history. There are probably as many definitions of it as there are practitioners, but one important branch of the field centers on the form, distribution, and density of mood-altering mechanisms in historical societies. These can be foods and drugs like chocolate, peyote, alcohol, opium, and cocaine. But the list of mechanisms also includes things we do or endure: ritual, dance, reading, gossip, sport, and, in a more negative way, poverty and abuse. Every human society, past and present, arguably has its own unique complex of mood-altering mechanisms, in the same way that each society has distinctive family structures, religious forms, and other cultural attributes. Neurohistory is designed to explore those mechanisms and explain how and why they change over time.
Seydlitz89 –My Conclusions on “Defining Literacy”
My last post has been up for a while and I was very pleased with the comments that came from it. I’ve had a bit of time to consider the various points made so here are my conclusions:First, there seems to be a good bit of disagreement as to what “literacy” actually means. Is it being able to read labels on medicine bottles, or read and understand books, or is not reading/text required at all? From a Western perspective, I think we link literacy with reading/text/the written word. Other cultures may combine literacy with orality, but Western cultures do not, that is there is a distinction. To this I would add that this form of Western literacy was a requirement for much of our history since the invention of the printing press. Without this form of literacy, science and rational capitalism (as opposed to traditional capitalism) would never have changed the world the way they have. Without this literacy it would have been impossible for the modern world to exist as we know it.
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