Recommended Reading & Viewing
Top Billing! PART I. CNAS – Triage:The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan (PDF)
Released in anticipation of a heavy-duty, A-List CNAS conference on Thursday that includes CENTCOM chief Gen. Petraeus, I consider this paper by Andrew Exum, Nathaniel Fick, Ahmed Humayun and David Kilcullen to be a must-read for the reverberations it will have in the USG’s national security community ( I do not agree with Exum-Kilcullen’s earlier proposed end of all drone attacks BTW – swinging the pendulum too far. Here they say “strictly curtail” instead, leaving the window open for targeting AQ leadership and key operatives). From the introduction:
….To implement this strategy effectively, the United States must rapidly triage in both countries. For the United States, NATO, and the governments involved, winning control over all of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the coming year is not a realistic objective; setting priorities is paramount. But because populations in civil wars tend to side with whichever group exercises control, protecting the population must take precedence over all other considerations. What counts, for now, is controlling what we can with the resources we have. Thus, this paper recommends that the United States and its allies pursue an “ink blot” strategy over the course of the next 12 months on both sides of the Durand Line, securing carefully chosen areas and then building from positions of strength.2
The tasks facing Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus—as well as their civilian counterparts, Ambassadors Karl Eikenberry and Richard Holbrooke—are complex and difficult. Yet, they must recognize one crucial thing: in insurgencies, momentum counts. The Taliban is pursuing a strategy of exhaustion designed to bleed away public support in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe for continued Western engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If the United States and its allies are unable to halt the downward trajectory of the war in Afghanistan over the next year, then public support for the war effort in the United States will surely ebb. That decline in popular support for the war is likely to be even sharper in allied nations. Regaining momentum will allow the United States and its allies to sustain public support both in Afghanistan and at home, prerequisites to defeating the Taliban.
Top Billing! PART II. Kings of War (Beitz) – 100 Years of COIN: What new have we Learned?
A phenomenal post on COIN by David Beitz. Then again if you write 50,000 word essay, cut that to a 10,000 word chapter and then distill the chapter into a blog post, then the blog post should be pretty impressive. Note Beitz’s mention of yet to be released The Insurgent Archipelago
On a lighter note, Drew Conway offers up The Five Demons of Twitter
Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold) – Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention”
Of interest to anyone who teaches, preaches, presents or briefs 1.0 in a 2.0 world.
The National Security Archive – The first national intelligence estimate (1960), on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program (PDF)
NIE # 1 is refreshing in it’s lack of weasel word phrasing and its realpolitik analysis of the implications of an Israeli A-bomb that are free of the comical, politicized, contortions involved in reporting or analyzing Iran’s similar nuclear efforts today. The refusal to examine logical probabilities in the IC had not emerged yet.
Coming Anarchy –The House of Cards Trilogy
I share Curzon’s enthusiasm here.
9,000-year-old brew hitting the shelves this summer
Cool.
RECOMMENDED FUTURISM VIEWING:
Futurist Jamais Cascio’s presentation “Mobile Intelligence”
Futurist
View more PDF documents from Jamais Cascio.
The Talk:
Pete Alcorn on the world in 2200:
That’s it!
