zenpundit.com

Top Billing! T. Greer –Far Right and Far Left – Two Peas in a Pod?

….There are two groups who consistently oppose this plutocratic “pragmatic” consensus: the far left and the far right. These two groups, seemingly divided, are united by their “radical” opposition to many otherwise unquestioned aspects of America’s standing political regime. To name but a few:

• The belief that the United States federal government should play a strong role in holding up the U.S. economy – particularly sectors deemed “Too Big To Fail.” 

• Strong support for subsidies or other forms of ‘corporate welfare’ for influential or strategic industries (“The Farm Lobby,” “Big Pharma,” and the energy sector – both the “Big Oil” and green energy varieties – are prominent examples).

• A commitment to America’s global hegemony and globalization writ large. The chosen instruments for this are transnational economic agreements, financial interventions (as pioneered by the IMF), or offers of substantial military assistance. 

• The use of drone strikes, special forces and other ‘limited war‘ operations as the most effective response to international terrorist movements.

• A disdain for the rule of law and governmental transparency. 

• Prioritizing national security over privacy and individual rights.

• Eclipse of the legislative branch in favor of an increasingly large, complex, and powerful executive. Outsourcing legislative policy making to congressional, think tanks, or industry wonks.  

Tea-party and Occupy members are opposed to most, if not all, of these things. However, identfying the real problem does not ensure the two sides will agree on solutions. What party program could unify the two sides? Mr. Parameswaran outlines one possible solution. He labels it “radical centrism: [….] 

An outstanding post . Hat tip to L.C. Rees 

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen – (Blaisep)Under a Field of Flowers: Captain Emil Kapaun 

….As Chinese Communist forces encircled the battalion, Kapaun moved fearlessly from foxhole to foxhole under direct enemy fire in order to provide comfort and reassurance to the outnumbered Soldiers. He repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire to recover wounded men, dragging them to safety. When he couldn’t drag them, he dug shallow trenches to shield them from enemy fire. As Chinese forces closed in, Kapaun rejected several chances to escape, instead volunteering to stay behind and care for the wounded. He was taken as a prisoner of war by Chinese forces on Nov. 2, 1950.

After he was captured, Kapaun and other prisoners were marched for several days northward toward prisoner-of-war camps. During the march Kapaun led by example in caring for injured Soldiers, refusing to take a break from carrying the stretchers of the wounded while encouraging others to do their part.

Once inside the dismal prison camps, Kapaun risked his life by sneaking around the camp after dark, foraging for food, caring for the sick, and encouraging his fellow Soldiers to sustain their faith and their humanity. On at least one occasion, he was brutally punished for his disobedience, being forced to sit outside in subzero weather without any garments. When the Chinese instituted a mandatory re-education program, Kapaun patiently and politely rejected every theory put forth by the instructors. Later, Kapaun openly flouted his captors by conducting a sunrise service on Easter morning, 1951. 

Emil Kapaun, US Army captain, Catholic priest, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient and a martyr for religious freedom, is the American Maximilian Kolbe

SWJ – Understanding Groupthink and Aligning FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency with Reality 

….To illustrate the nuanced challenges of groupthink, we informally surveyed a small group of Intermediate Level students at one of the Defense Department’s educational institutions.  The students were junior field grade officers from joint and international services, nearing the end of their year-long education.  Our survey asked two questions:  1) Whether their education had formally addressed groupthink as a subject; and 2) What were groupthink’s causes?  A little more than half of the group responded that while groupthink had been discussed early in their education year, albeit briefly as part of a broader class topic, groupthink was not a central focus of the class.  In response to the causes of groupthink, about half of the group cited dominant personalities within a group who ignored dissenting opinions, and the inclination of group members to remain within the group’s good graces by avoiding dissention.  Less than one-fourth of the responses cited direct pressure on any member who objected to group opinions.[2]  What strikes us is not what the students said, but what they did not say.

Two excellent and – I might suggest, related – articles.

Lexington Green – Margaret Thatcher: Revolutionary, Leader

….There is always a “them” who are the current ruling group. They are the ones dealt into the existing game, its apologists and advocates. To take them on, to organize and lead an opposition movement, the leader must have extremely strong character. Such a leader must be self-assured, know how things really work, and have a very thick skin. The leader must have no regard for conventional wisdom and no respect for the often unstated limits of what can be done or, even more, what is “simply not done” or “simply not said.”

As a practical matter, such a leader must have the capacity to speak plainly and clearly to a majority of ordinary people who are quietly victimized in the existing game, to show them how certain changes will be good for them, and good generally. They do not lead by force or lies, they lead by telling hard truths and gaining assent to the hard path to better things.

Mrs. Thatcher was such a leader.  

Strategic Studies Institute – (Manwaring) Venezuela as an Exporter of 4th Generation Warfare Instability and (Bunker) Op-Ed: The Need For A “Half-Pivot to the Americas” 

Kings of War – (Betz) Kim Jong Un, We’re all gonna be like three little Fonzies here, OK? and (Egnell) Rethink, but don’t dismiss – on U.S. training of foreign troops 

The Glittering Eye – Personal Computers Aren’t Too Good 

Forbes –Nanotechnology’s Revolutionary Next Phase 

Taking Note –Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error 

It’s easy to see how not trying to find out who had done the erasing–burying the problem–was better for Michelle Rhee personally, at least in the short term. She had just handed out over $1.5 million in bonuses in a well-publicized celebration of the test increases[9]. She had been praised by presidential candidates Obama and McCain[10] in their October debate, and she must have known that she was soon to be on the cover of Time Magazine[11]. The public spectacle of an investigation of nearly half of her schools would have tarnished her glowing reputation, especially if the investigators proved that adults cheated–which seems likely given that their jobs depended on raising test scores.

Moreover, a cheating scandal might well have implicated her own “Produce or Else” approach to reform. Early in her first year she met one-on-one with each principal and demanded a written, signed guarantee[12] of precisely how many points their DC-CAS scores would increase.

Relying on the DC-CAS[13] was not smart policy because it was designed to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses. It did not determine whether students passed or were promoted to the next grade, which meant that many students blew it off. 

Recommended Viewing:

Top billing! Sam Liles  – Manhattan project for cyber security 

Mr. Lewis Shepherd of Microsoft came to Purdue to give a talk for CERIAS awhile back and he talked about how equating the Manhattan Project to the world of cyber security is completely wrong. I liked his talk quite a bit, and it aligned closely with something I’ve been talking to people about for awhile. Talking to people is important. I know my impact on the world is going to be negligible but I’ve dedicated my life to infecting the youth of the world with a few stray ideas. They call it teaching, and it doesn’t pay much. I think Mr. Shepherd was making a good case that scope, and cause and effect, and process of one program might no align realistically with another program. The secrecy, single mindedness, and type of problem that was the Manhattan project has almost nothing to do with the quite different project of cyber security. Much like I’ll never be able to equate my teaching to Socrates, the cyber security community shouldn’t really think “Manhattan Project”.

….Everything you likely think about defense in depth is wrong. All of the audit and compliance stuff is wrong. The firewall and intrusion detection and prevention technologies are wrong. The autocratic and dictatorial policies of information security are wrong. The underlying theories of robust and resilient programming are wrong. There is nothing about the current information technology infrastructure that is security oriented. The foundations of the technologies are fundamentally at odds with creation of an information secure culture. Now to be honest I didn’t say this. Neumann, Saltzer, Cerf, Bernack, and so many other people said this long before I did. But, maybe you haven’t read their stuff before.

How can I possibly support that they are all wrong and don’t work? Pretty simple. They don’t. Though we can secure systems to some point we are almost always talking about a security absent some failure in the system. There is nothing really secure. This is a huge problem that breaks most peoples “common sense” way of thinking about security. Simply put the way we do things will never be secure and we should stop trying to fix things the way we know doesn’t work. 

Read the rest here.

John Hagel –A Contrarian View on Resilience 

In a world of growing uncertainty and mounting performance pressure, it’s understandable that resilience has become a very hot topic. Everyone is talking about it and writing about it. We all seem to want to develop more resilience. But I’m going to take a contrarian position and suggest that resilience, at least as conventionally defined, is a distraction and perhaps even dangerous.

….In this context, the conventional view of “bounce back” resilience for enterprises is profoundly dangerous. It simply increases the ability of the institutional status quo to survive when conditions demand a fundamental transformation. It increases the gap between what we are doing and what we need to do. We already face a growing mismatch between the institutions and practices that dominate in business and the needs of the markets and societies that are being re-shaped by the global forces outlined earlier. As long as this mismatch persists, we will face increasing disruptions and stress as struggle to maintain institutions and practices that are no longer viable. We don’t need to bounce back; we desperately need to move forward.

International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) –“Who Matters Online: Measuring Influence, evaluating content and countering violent extremism in online social networks“ by JM Berger and Bill Strathearn

J.M. Berger, author of Jihad Joe (reviewed here by Charles) frequently tackles Islamist militants and various kinds of terrorism at Intelwire but the focus in the above paper is on far Right,  white nationalist and radical racist strands of violent extremism

SWJ Blog–  (Bunker) Review: Intersections of Crime and Terror and (Sullivan) Spillover/Narcobloqueos in Texas 

A new Texas Department of Public Safety Threat Assessment report states that  criminal cartels are operating in Texas and are the No. 1 threat to the Lone Star State. Narcobloqueos (narco-blockades) are now being seen north of the border.

Eeben Barlow – Failing to Listen 

….Often, the government forces appear to be very well trained in running away

Timothy Thomas – Why China is reading your email

Abu Muqawama (Trombly) – Limits of Proxy Warfare in Syria 

GLORIA Center – (Col. Norvel DeAtkine) Western Influence on Arab Militaries: Pounding Square Pegs into Round Holes 

David Stockman – State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America 

ZeroHedge – List Released With 132 Names Who Pulled Cyprus Deposits Ahead Of “Confiscation Day”

Harvard Magazine –The Humanities, Digitized 

Chicago Boyz (Foster) –RERUN–Author Appreciation: Rose Wilder Lane

From BOYD & BEYOND 2012:

Dr. Chet Richards on the work of  Colonel John Boyd:

Top Billing! Scholar’s Stage –The Power of Ideas in Antiquity and What Senator Paul Accomplished 

….Rand Paul is not Daniel Webster. But the comparison is an important one: it gives us a sense of just how far the goal posts have been moved. There was once a time when Senators and Representatives were expected to plead their case before the American people on the House and Senate floors.  Debate and discussion by leading statesmen in public forums was considered an essential part of popular democracy. Through such discussion Congressmen were held accountable and through this forum Congressmen would communicate to their constituents, and at times, to the nation. There is a strong correlation between the decline of popular discourse on the Senate and House floors and the eclipse of the national legislature by the technocrats of a bloated executive branch. 

By bucking all of these sad trends Senator Paul has done our Republic a great favor. This is true even if the critics are correct. Senator Paul may be an unprincipled scally-wag who is using this filibuster purely for personal advantage, but this does not curtail his accomplishment. Senator Paul has proven than a rising politician can publicly declare his opposition to the establishment consensus and not be marginalized by doing so. Indeed, as the massive wave of twittering that accompanied the senator’s stand suggests, Rand Paul has benefited, not suffered, from his decision to take the ruling class consensus head on.

It is good to see T. Greer back after a long hiatus

Small Wars Journal (Octavian Manea) –The American Way of War after COIN’s Waterloo: An Interview with Fred Kaplan 

OM: Can we talk and point to a “Petraeus Generation”? An Accidental Generation? Or by design? I mean most of “the insurgents” (the COINdinistas) shared a common cognitive map or were influenced to some extent by the same “big ideas”: the classic COIN masters (Galula, Thompson, Kitson, Larteguy), classic COIN campaigns (Malaya, Vietnam) or by the “moot-wah” wars of the 1990s.

FK: The key thing is that an entire generation of officers has fought, and trained for, COIN-style wars – and no other kind. This is bound to have some kind of enduring impact. Also the fact that the Soviet Union has since imploded means that, much as some might like to do so, the military can’t go back to the firepower-intensive wars (“the American way of war”; there’s no logical enemy for them. Hard to say.) Some of these officers were influenced by the “big ideas,” but the bigger influence was their experience. As far back as the mid-’80s, when the generals of the day were referring to any conflict smaller than major combat operations as “Military Operations Other Than War” (moot-wah), the junior officers were engaged in precisely those kinds of conflicts (Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, etc.) – and they sure felt like war to the officers. Iraq and Afghanistan, especially from 2007 on, solidified this sense.

I’m a fan of Octavian’s interview series on COIN – hope he continues.

INTELWIRE.com – Inspire 10: Still Sucks 

I guess I’m never going to get to write a self-congratulatory post about how I got a shout-out in Inspire, because I still don’t have anything much good to say about it.

Issue No. 10 of the English-language vehicle for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula just came out, and while it’s crawled back from the precipice of copy-editing collapse hinted at in its last issue, it’s still a sad little effort that gets taken awfully seriously.

The “hit list” of targets named by Al Qaeda and friends repeatedly over the years is neither fresh nor surprising. The recycled content remains recycled, the original content remains uninspired. The flashy graphics remain flashy.

The part of the publication that most concerns U.S. counterterrorism officials is, of course, “Open-Source Jihad,” AQAP’s how-to guide for “lone wolf” terrorists. Regular readers will recall that this feature was self-parody from the beginning, and it’s descended further into absurdity with this issue’s advice that Western mujahideen should try to cause traffic accidents and carry out ninja-style assassinations. And no, I’m not joking, that’s really their advice….

The Sophmores of jihad…..

Duck of Minerva – ‘Rodman-gate’ Can ‘Useful Idiots’ please stop shilling for North Korea (Robert Kelly) and Is the Weakness of the Liberal Order Overblown (Josh Busby)

Feral Jundi – Soviet soldier missing for 33 years, found alive in Afghanistan

Not the Singularity (Bob Morris) –Clay Claiborne banned from Daily Kos for Speaking the Truth about Syria 

Eeben Barlow – “The Specialists” 

USNI Blog – Guest Post by LTJG Matthew Hipple: From Epipolae to Cyberwar 

Steven Pressfield Online (Shawn Coyne) –The Difference Between Self-Discipline and Self-Flagellation

Boing Boing – Invisibility Cloak Demoed at TED2013 

The Volokh Conspiracy –En Banc Ninth Circuit Holds That Computer Forensic Searches Are Like “Virtual Strip Searches” And Require Reasonable Suspicion At the Border

The National Interest – Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy

WPR (Dr. Steve Metz) –Strategic Horizons: Iraq’s Biggest questions still Unanswered for US 

Aeon (James Palmer) – The Bailinghou 

Scientific American (Heather Pringle) –The Origin of Human Creativity Was Surprisingly Complex 

The Atlantic (Ta-Nehisi Coates) –‘Lucrative Work for Free Oportunity’

Recommended Viewing:

Top Billing! Galrahn at USNI blog –Honesty can be Uncomfortable

During the panel discussion on the Chinese Navy last week at the USNI West Conference in San Diego, Captain James Fanell, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence and Information Operations for US Pacific Fleet had some “bracing” comments about the Chinese Navy. When I quote “bracing” I am actually quoting Sam Roggeveen of the Australian Lowy Institute Interpreter blog.

What makes the comments “bracing” is that they are both blunt and honest in commentary. Sam noted the Captain’s comments like this:

Fanell’s language is, well, bracing. He calls China ‘hegemonic’ and says it displays ‘aggression’; he claims China ‘bullies adversaries’ and that it has become a ‘mistrusted principal threat’. Watch Captain Fanell’s presentation from about 21 minutes into the above video, or read below for some more select quotes:

• (China’s) expansion into the blue waters are largely about countering the US Pacific fleet.’
• The PLA Navy is going to sea to learn how to do naval warfare…Make no mistake: the PRC navy is focused on war at sea, and sinking an opposing fleet.’
• On China Marine Surveillance, which supervises and patrols China’s claimed maritime territory: ‘If you map out their harassments you will see that they form a curved front that has over time expanded out against the coast of China’s neighbours, becoming the infamous nine-dashed line, plus the entire East China Sea…China is negotiating for control of other nations’ resources off their coasts; what’s mine is mine, and we’ll negotiate what’s yours.’
• China Marine Surveillance cutters have no other mission but to harass other nations into submitting to China’s expansive claims…China Marine Surveillance is a full-time maritime sovereignty harassment organisation’.
• In my opinion, China is knowingly, operationally and incrementally seizing maritime rights of its neighbours under the rubric of a maritime history that is not only contested in the international community but has largely been fabricated by Chinese government propaganda bureaus in order to “educate” the populous about China’s rich maritime history, clearly as a tool to sustain the Party’s control.’

Sam Roggeveen is right to describe Captain Fanell’s comments as “bracing,” because it has certainly been awhile since we have seen an American in a public forum speak the truth about China in this way. While we will never see an American diplomat speak like this, nor does the opinion of a US Navy Captain carry the weight of, say, a four star Admiral; this is still very powerful commentary when it comes from a man who is responsible for the evaluation of all intelligence gathered by Pacific Command every single day. 

HG’s World – My Own Pivot to the Sea 

….This past week I was privileged to attend the West 2013 Conference in San Diego, where I was able to attend several panel discussions and a very informative luncheon where the guests were the Chief of Naval Operations ADM Jonathan W. Greenert, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen James F. Amos, and Commandant of the Coast Guard ADM Robert J. Papp Jr. who participated in a round table discussion of the future of the sea services. I have linked the video below, and encourage all to take an hour to listen carefully the their words. 

Another, panel I attended discussed the Chinese Navy and her intentions, be they a challenge or a potential partner in maintaining safe passage for all maritime global commerce. That video is also below. 

Adam Elkus at AFJ – Competition in Cyberspace 

….Network-centric warfare is a paramount example of how cyber-enabled military operations merged with mainstream tenets of American strategic culture. Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski and his collaborators married technology with an expansive geopolitical vision of American ability to determine “rule sets” in an international system that he judged to be imperiled by information-technology-enabled regional actors. Network-enabled force and flexible logistics would help the United States contain the damage from such actors, spread globalization’s connectivity to disconnected regions and deter new conflicts. These geopolitical ideas, while wrapped in metaphors from systems science and economics, are at their core very much rooted in a traditionally American brand of liberal internationalism. The United States does not trust a balance-of-power system abroad to create national security, and thus has historically sought the military capability to create favorable regional, national-level and substate political outcomes.

American military hegemony, coupled with a penchant for cyber-enabled regional intervention, is what is driving adversaries’ search for countermeasures. A military competition is underway over military cyber power. 

Steven Metz  at WPR –Strategic Horizons: Make North Korea Understand the Cost of Provocation

Dan Trombly – The Sources of Perpetual War  

Thomas P.M. Barnett –Interesting Panel on the Chinese Navy (video) 

Razib Khan – Jared Diamond and the Anthropologists and Against the Cultural Anthropologists 

Dan Nexon – How Reality-based is the Community?  

SWJ –“In the Service of Humanity and Civilization”? The Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1878)

Dart Throwing Chimp –Advocascience 

Recommended Viewing:

Top Billing! Zero Hedge  –Taleb On “Skin In The Game” And His Disdain For Public Intellectuals 

Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the time as Taleb wonders rigorously from the basic tenets of capitalism – “being more about disincentives that incentives” as failure (he believes) is critical to its success (and is clearly not allowed in our current environment) – to his intellectual influences (and total disdain for the likes of Krugman, Stiglitz, and Friedman – who all espouse grandiose and verbose work with no accountability whatsoever). His fears of large centralized states (such as the US is becoming and Europe is become) being prone to fail along with his libertarianism make for good viewing. However, his fundamental premise that TBTF banks should be nationalized and the critical importance of ‘skin in the game’ for a functioning financial system are all so crucial for the current ‘do no harm’ regime in which we live. Grab a beer (or glass of wine, it is Taleb) and watch…

Via Redmond Weissenberger of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Of Canada,

SWJ Blog Announcing Peter J. Munson’s “War, Welfare & Democracy” and Exemplar, Not Crusader 

….My book is in large part intended to be a corrective to the driving imperative of our foreign policy.

No matter what portion of the ideological spectrum Americans come at world problems from, their views are shaped in a way by the idea of the “end of history.” We think that political development has a single endpoint, that being liberal democracy.

I’m not arguing that there’s a better endpoint.

Instead, I’m arguing that America cannot get the world to that endpoint in the near term. America needs to be more humble in its foreign policies, more realistic than its current expectation of instant modernization without any instability, and more cognizant of the significant challenges it faces in getting its own house in order.

In a phrase, I argue that America should focus more on being an exemplar than a crusader.

First, the world is undergoing a massive wave of change, bringing rapid development and modernization to more people than ever before. I show that this change is intensely destabilizing. It took the West centuries to progress from the corrupt rule of warlords to liberal democracy.

There is no reason to believe that America can remake the world—or even a corner of it—in its image in the course of a few years. We are going to face a period of intensifying instability in the developing world and we need to understand that some things just cannot be neatly managed, much less controlled. We can’t bring on the end of history by using war to spread democracy and the welfare state (used in the academic, not pejorative sense).

Dr. Tdaxp –Science is Real. Measurement is Real. Improvement Is Real and This Too Shall Pass 

Longtime blogfriend Dr. Tdaxp has been on an epistemological tear of late.

Duck of Minerva –Podcast No. 19: Interview with Daniel Drezner and   Lifting the Combat Ban for Women: why the policy change is the right choice

Dr. MacKenzie’s post celebrates a change in policy that is going to be extremely difficult to implement once the military moves beyond the very few female soldiers and Marines who can meet minimum PT standards for combat specialties and are highly motivated to join combat arms. Aside from the issue of qualifying standards (two or one or one new “de-gendered”) the women admitted to combat will still have to shoulder a pack and gear that now can tip the scales at an astronomical 120 lbs and then march and fight under that weight. This is three times the weight of the WWII GI’s kit and more than twice the weight of medieval plate armor. We are going to have to either find very tall and athletic women or expect a very high rate of knee, hip and back injuries during sustained campaigns removing female soldiers from their units. There is also the issue of the difference between sporadic combat seen in COIN with shorter stints “outside the wire” where women have made valorous contributions and the day to day, week to week, month to month grind of total war conventional battles like D-Day, Okinawa, the Bulge or Chosin which have a much different actuarial logic than COIN.  Any conflict of that order will require a mass army based on conscription and not a small,  selective, professional AVF and drafting millions of young women into combat is something to be viewed with skepticism

The Glittering Eye – When You’re Rich They Think You Really Know
Dave takes a very different tack on the Bill Gates op-ed and the utility of measurement than Dr. Tdaxp

Thomas P.M. Barnett –China’s future with a only-child society 

China embarked on the greatest demographic social engineering experiment in history. The results are now with us.

That’s it.