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Top Billing!  Information Dissemination – Theories and Considerations

Missed this when Galrahn originally posted it. It’s a “must read” post for understanding where US Navy strategy could go in the next decade. First rate work!

Thomas P.M. Barnett –  “Why Ahmadinejad Is Better for the U.S. Than Moussavi”

I strongly agree here with Tom that the Pasdaran clique of Iranian “siloviki” from the IRGC and security ministries have now gained the upper hand over the clergy as a whole, by aligning with the hardest line minority of clerics. Guns trump turbans.

Whirledview (CKR) – Turning Points

Cheryl Rofer’s next post in our 1913 discussion.

Edge Perspectives with John Hagel- Shift Happens Redux

John details his new longitudinal Shift Index.

The Committee of Public Safety – The Soviet Package of Liberty

The Soviets as strategic spoilers.

Rough Type – The sour Wikipedian

Nick Carr makes the argument that Wikipedians – and by extension, social media user types – are basically loner a-holes. Thanks Nick!

Zero Intelligence Agents – Interstate Conflict and Genetic Similarity; Consequences for COIN  and Fog of COIN

The second post is not by Drew Conway, but is a guest post by Thomas Zeitzoff of NYU and a review of David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla.

Progressive Historians (Ellman) – Living On $2 A Day: An Interview With Economist Jonathan Morduch

A fascinating look at the often sophisticated market activity of the world’s “bottom billions”.

SWJ Blog (Dilegge) – War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age

Book review.

physicsworld.com – In search of the black swans

Is the professional and institutional culture of scientists discouraging future paradigm shifts ?

Howard Bloom – In Praise Of Consumerism – Bees, Bacteria And The Value Of Wasted Time

The latent creativity and discovery for the many in the “wasted” time of the few.

PARAMETERS –    “The End of Proportionality” and    “Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars”

Jonathan F. Keiler and Michael Walzer discuss how the concept of “proportionality” in the Laws of War are applied and (more frequently) misunderstood and misapplied.

SEED – Did Cooking Make Us Human?

Did a piece of cultural evolution – cooking food – drive human evolution ?

The Jamestown Foundation – Mystery Surrounds Alleged Hezbollah Links to Drug Arrests in Curacao

A somewhat older article. It begs the question of  to what degree has Hezbollah penetrated the Lebanese and Arab diaspora in Latin America?

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Paul Collier on “Post-Conflict Recovery” – salvaging failed states (2009).

Iran’s internal politics,  a conversation with Karim Sadjadpour (2007)

This kind of post is supposed to be a Sunday thing, but summer means throwing patterns overboard, while walking around in khaki shorts and drinking overpriced microbrew. Been working on a big “think” post, on and off, but it is not ready yet.

Top Billing! Lexington Green – David Kilcullen at the Pritzker Military Library

….Waiting in line to get my book autographed, after the talk, the guy in front of me asked Dr. Kilcullen, “could you recommend three books on counterinsurgency?” Kilcullen started to hedge, “well, I can’t really … .” I intervened, “c’mon, your on the spot, go ahead and name three.” He smiled and sat back and said, “well, OK, I’d say Seven Pillars, and Galula on Counterinsurgency, you know Galula? And also one, by an Al Qaeda theorist, called the Management of Savagery“.

You have to imagine all that in an Australian accent.

An interesting top three. Galula is pretty much the Bible, though there are dissenters, who dismiss Mao-era counter-insurgency as outdated. Obviously, Kilcullen does not think so. And T.E. Lawrence seems to have a more mixed reputation, but Kilcullen came up with his book first. And I am a fairly obsessive amateur, yet I had never heard of the Management of Savagery

Nice!

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Hong Kong’s membership in a larger China: the liberty maintained for now, but the elections still postponed and The weak tug of Tiananmen among China’s youth

Chinese takeout from Tom. The Chinese students of 1989 might end up being akin to the European generation of 1848.

SWJ – How to Think about Mexico and Beyond

….Our worst hemispheric nightmare would be a country with desperation of Haiti, the hostility of Cuba, the cash of Venezuela, the capabilities of Brazil, and the proximity of Mexico… and that country could be Mexico.

Mexico is the national security community’s elephant – wait, no, mastodon – in the room.
Information Dissemination – The Industry and Social Software

Galrahn takes a short break from Naval gazing to tackle another of his areas of expertise.

Whoa – our special envoy thinks a Pushtun tent is a cocktail reception in Paris and that he is Roman Polanski. Hat tip to Abu Muqawama.

Whirledview -CKR – Those Crowds in the Streets

Cheryl ties Khameini to Nicholas II via biographer and historian Robert K. Massie in a thoughtful post.

Fabius Maximus – The best geopolitical webposts, ever

Love the pony.

Steve Coll – Iran’s Perpetual Revolution

Always a sober voice.

Foreign Policy – The Next Big Thing

Mini-futurism. Parag Khanna decides to be the shorter Martin van Creveld in four paragraphs.

That’s it!

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. Hat tip to Lexington Green.

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”

Mobile Intelligence

View more PDF documents from Jamais Cascio.

The Talk:

Pete Alcorn on the world in 2200:

That’s it!

Top Billing! BLACKFIVE – for their Memorial Day series of posts

Many personal tributes. Go visit!

HG’s World – Memorial Day 2009 and Memorial Day II

A historically-minded tribute from a veteran and a historian.

Fast Company -“I Can See You” by Jamais Cascio

Radical transparency

Abu Muqawama – Greatest. Red Team. Ever.

Yep.

Thomas PM Barnett – WPR column – The New Rules: The Good News on the Global Financial Downturn

Tom’s “in-your-face-pessimists!” survey on the state of post-meltdown globalization and war.

ArmsControlWonk – Essential Reading? (Also check out their coverage of the North Korean nuclear test)

Michael Krepon gives us an excellent reading list for those interested in nuclear strategy and Cold War history.

AFJ – A deterrence we need by Gene Myers

On the folly of nuclear abolitionism

Sic Semper Tyrannis – Haaretz Article on Iranian Realities

The logistical and operational difficulties of an Israeli conventional-only strike on Iranian nuclear facilities without US help and Col. Lang’s opinion that Iran’s leadership is doing all it can to make Israel’s case for help look good.

James Fallows – Back to the gaokao….

Where standardized testing – or rather “the” standardized test – is the educational system and China’s officialdom is starting to wonder if that rigidity isn’t killing creativity and innovation. If only the advocates of NCLB here knew as much as Red Chinese bureaucrats.

SEED – Creation on Command

Neuropsychological inhibition and creativity – how does relaxing control yield ideas?

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely demonstrates how adding complexity to choice dramatically skews decision making in irrational ways.  A few years back, Scientific American had an article with research on choice and happiness that demonstrated that the optimum number of choices for human happiness was relatively low. Ariely takes that one step further, many choices often equates to bad decision making because of our tendency to operate on “autopilot” (he does not use that term but it is what he describes).

Top Billing! CTlab Symposium on P.W. Singer’s Wired For War

CTlab Symposium: Wired for War, additional readings 

Opening Remarks  P.W. Singer

Whither the Anti-Killer Robot Lobby?  Charli Carpenter

Wired for … Nuclear War?  Martin Senn

Studying War on an Infinite Battlefield  Drew Conway

More Thoughts On Robots and IHL  Rex Brynen

When Robots Are Not Just About Autonomy – Remote Platform Targeted Killing  Kenneth Anderson

Implications for command and control  Antoine Bousquet

Provocation: Wiring Terrorist Sanctuaries  Mike Innes

Brave New World?  John Matthew Barlow

Harvard KSG on ‘Unmanned and Robotic Warfare’  Drew Conway

Kudos to Mike Innes and CTLab Review for organizing this symposium on Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, which has an impressive roster of scholars, bloggers and the author Peter Singer participating. I just began reading Wired for War last night and it is excellent, the must read “future of warfare”book for 2009.

(I am however, disturbed by the frequency of pop cultural references from my youth in Wired for War, which, if read in a tome on modern warfare, presents the reader with the inescapable conclusion that they are getting….old)

The New York Times –  The Civil Heretic

This portrait of Freeman Dyson, one of the more important living scientific minds, and his ostracism at the hands of the global warming commissars in academia who brook no dissent from the party line, is one of the best NYT pieces I’ve seen in a while.

Scientific American – Building the 21st-Century Mind

The Rise of the Synthesizers. I have some problems with Howard Gardner, which range from his eschewing scientific rigor in investigating learning theories whenever it suits his political views to do so, to writing books that are, at best, unevenly developed arguments. That said, Gardner always has several important, worthwhile and often powerful concepts or insights amidst the other clutter he’s presenting. This is no exception. Accept the wheat, discard the chaff.

CTOvision – Widespread Cyber Espionage: More evidence and what to do about it

I will pair this with Michael Tanji’s Stop Reading About Cyber Security and Sam Liles’ Into the darkness of cyber warfare

Haft of the Spear – Everyone is an analyst

A quality rant that includes -and I quote – “. . . there are not enough short buses in this world to transport these people to crazy town.” Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

Sic Semper Tyrannis – A good plan for Afghanistan… and Bob Gates on FNS – Yes, that’s what we are doing.

Have not checked in with the curmudgeonly and paleoconservative Col. Lang in a while. : )

Mapping Strategy – ‘Planning’ in Fog at High Speed

Art is my metacognitive amigo.

Dr. Von – Dispelling a Myth – Public Schools do Better in Math than Private

I am not surprised, statistically speaking, that any study that was constructed adequately so as to compare students on an apples to apples basis would demonstrate these findings. Once you control for intellectual selectivity, or at times, just basic socioeconomic level, the private advantage is lost (Harvard with open admissions would no longer be Harvard, in essence)

Recommended Viewing:

Hat tip to Network Weaving:

That’s it!