Recommended Reading

To Billing! Peter J. Munson – The Black Hole of Real Thinking

…Nor are we particularly attuned to operate in complexity.  I do not believe that the complexity of today’s operating environment is really dramatically different than that of days gone by.  Some argue that today’s problems are “complex,” and thus different and more difficult from the simply “complicated” problems of yesterday.  Direct causality can be determined in complicated problems, according to this analysis anyway, while complex problems have so many interconnected variables that causal linkages between action and outcome cannot be determined.  Perhaps the defeat of the Germans and Japanese was simply a complicated problem.  Then so too was that of the Iraqi army and the Afghan Taliban regime.  Under the complex/complicated dichotomy, though, how could the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the establishment of the “Marshall Plan,” and indeed the creation of a new postwar world order, be anything but complex?  How were those problems any less complex than those of post-2003 Iraq?  While two retired colonels writing in Armed Forces Journal (Kevin Benson and Steven Rotkoff) argue that “decision-making in the 21st century will take place under conditions of ambiguity and hyperspeed in information” (whatever that means), I’d argue that the only differences between today and yesterday are that yesterday’s ambiguity due to incomplete information and imperfect communications means has become today’s ambiguity due to incomplete but cacophonously copious information.

Fabius Maximus- Cyberwar: a Whole New Quagmire – When the Drones Come To Roost

WIRED Magazine reports that the US drone fleet’s command-and-control systems at Creech Air Force Base are compromised by a piece of malware that appears to be logging keystrokes and otherwise, “We think it’s benign.” If  having a keylogger on a weapons system’s command-and-control console is “benign” we don’t want to know what “malicious” is – though perhaps the operators of the Iranian reactor at Beshehr could share some of their experiences. There is, simply put, no way that malware should be able to get onto competently built control systems. There are plenty of ways it could get onto incompetently built control systems, starting with….

Thomas P.M. Barnett-My best explanation of Wikistrat yet

….So how would I describe Wikistrat as we embark on our midstage effort?

….It thus proved, to a pleasantly surprising degree (for me, at least) the viability of a phrase I had started using last spring after Joel and Daniel confronted me with their idea of the competition: we are building the world’s first MMOC, as in, a massively multiplayer online consultancy.  So, it’s not just the community (Facebook of strategists) and it’s not just the environment (Wikipedia/GLOMOD), it’s the MMOC that combines the two into a product-offering machine.I had written about this back in “Blueprint for Action” (2005) in my concluding bit called, “Headlines from the Future” (last entry for the 2020 timeframe)

SWJ – How Corruption Affects National Security of the United States

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