Of course, there’s not a few ” implicit villains ” out there who fear it will work. Something worth recalling because as PNM spreads throughout the public mind some of the attacks on it are going to get pretty shrill, become intellectually dishonest and frankly, personal. Self-interests are being challenged here of established, powerful, selfish, insider elites who like the Gap just as it is – quite sick but a reality of politics.

Rule #6: Vertical scenarios harm vertical systems more, while horizontal scenarios harm horizontal systems more.

This rule simply says that Rule #5 is basically wrong, despite what people in both systems tend to believe. In reality, vertical strikes can do little damage to truly distributed systems. If someone wipes out the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court one afternoon, nothing would really change in our country in terms of our ability to maintain rule. Yes, it would be a huge shock, but it would not be hard to replace all those leaders rather quickly. I could find you 535 ex-senators and representatives living within a ten-mile radius of the Capitol itself who could easily step back into rule, tell me how hard it would be to find nine lawyers in Washington who think they are smart enough to sit on the Supreme Court! But even beyond those facile examples lies the reality that we have 50 “farm teams” around the country, each complete with their own set of executives, supreme courts, and legislative branches. You if you wipe out our national leadership you do not really kill our capacity for leadership, because we have got more political leaders than we can count! What really stresses out horizontal systems like the U.S. are the horizontal scenarios that never seem to end, like a Great Depression, which really only ended when the vertical shock of Pearl Harbor put the country on another pathway. In contrast, vertical systems like Saddam Hussein’s regime can really be dismembered quite profoundly simply by taking out the leadership. Remember the “most wanted” deck of cards? That said we really needed to nail only about 50 bad actors in Iraq and we would have eliminated the bulk of the Baath party rule.

I’m not sure here to the extent to which I agree and disagree. Earlier I stated that problem of ” marginality ” or ” tipping points ” at which a horizontal system crosses the threshold in which the accumulated stress triggers an irrevocable downward, accelerating, systemic death spiral. I still expect that principle to be true because it has universality in organized systems – everything tends toward entropy eventually. After re-reading this passage though I’m now inclined to think that such a tipping point is more likely to be reached by a combination of intersecting horizontal and vertical scenarios than a set of vertical scenario attacks acting in unison. Then again, I think if enough vertical scenarios hit a horizontal systems ” choke points” you can get a similar effect.

Well done Dr. Barnett ! You’re knocking me off my usual perch of analytical certainty – I’d really like to hear some input on this particular rule from some of the very bright people out there who check in here at Zenpundit regularly, even the ones who don’t always feel inclined to leave comments. My brain needs to be kick-started here with some differing perspectives.

Part IV will be in the works soon.

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