Recommended Reading

Top Billing! Adam Elkus Do Ideas Matter? A Clausewitzian Case Study

This article is, in my opinion, Adam’s finest work as a writer and strategic thinker. It even merited an enthusiastic and deserved “Excellent article. We need more like this!” comment from arch-clausewitzian defense consultant Wilf Owen.  Elkus asks sophisticated questions of competing interpretations of CvC and applies the understanding to analyze the cognitive culture of the defense community. Highly recommended.

The leaked The importance of seeing what isn’t there

This is also a stellar post IMHO:

….Absence-detection boosts the growth of shared human knowledge in at least three ways:

Development of knowledge: Generally, for shared knowledge to grow, someone must invest effort to develop a novel idea into something more substantial (resulting in a blog post, a doctoral dissertation, or whatever). A potential knowledge-creator may need some degree of confidence that the expected result doesn’t already exist. Better absence-detection can help build that confidence – or drop it to zero and abort a costly duplication.

Validation of knowledge: For shared knowledge to grow, something that looks like knowledge must gain enough credibility to be treated as knowledge. Some knowledge is born with credibility, inherited from a credible source, yet new knowledge, supported by evidence, can be discredited by arguments backed by nothing but noise. A crucial form of evidence for a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence against it.

Destruction of anti-knowledge: Shared knowledge can also grow through removal of of anti-knowledge, for example, by discrediting false ideas that had displaced or discredited true ones. Mirroring validation, a crucial form of evidence against the credibility of a proposition is sometimes the absence of credible evidence for it.

Charles Cameron at SmartMobsA most remarkable conversation

….Ayman al-Zawahiri, for instance, has twice quoted Will McCants and Jarret Brachman’s Stealing al-Qaida’s Playbook report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, once in a video and once in his book, The Exoneration. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi too has cited material from the CTC, comparing it favorably to that of his challengers within the jihadist environment…

Jeff Carr – Don’t be a Cyberista. We can’t afford it.

….You may have heard the term “Fashionista”; i.e., people devoted to the creations of a select group of fashion designers and who only wear their designs. I have adapted the term to reflect what I’m seeing happen in Washington DC as well as in major U.S. corporations. Decision makers are being swayed by whatever novel term, concept, or strategy is popular at the moment. Right now that term is APT (Advanced Persistant Threat). Tomorrow it will be something else. And the politician, policy maker, General, and C-level executive who makes an information security decision based solely on what’s hot at the moment is the cyber equivalent of a slave to fashion – a “Cyberista”.

Abu MuqawamaQuants and COIN

A little quantitative analysis goes a long way 😉

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