I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an offer from CEO Joel Zamel to join Wikistratas an analyst.
What this means, in essence, is that I will become a contributor of exclusive content to the Wikistrat site and will be collaborating on specific analyical products. In return, I will be able to feature some of their interesting pieces here, such items from future issues of their CoreGap Bulletin 11.04 [PDF]or video presentations by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnettor other Wikistrat experts. Here is their current public sample:
Wikistrat will also become a sponsor of zenpundit.com (actually, the only sponsor,as I do not normally accept advertising). If you have been visiting Chicago Boyz lately for the ongoing Roundtable, you may have noticed a Wikistrat banner ad there; there will be one here at ZP soon as well.
If you have enjoyed reading ZP over the years, I encourage you to subscribe to Wikistrat – not just to see what I’m writing, or Tom, but to get in early into an interactive, analytical community that is going to grow rapidly in terms of talent and influence.
Let me get this straight. The pro-jihadist website Islamic Awakening is now receiving funds from a university that wants to train future diplomats and some schools for aspiring police officers?
If so, do these educational establishments imagine they’re recruiting from the pool of wannabe jihadists who supposedly frequent the site — or from folks already in the FBI and counter-terrorism business, who may by now be the site’s only remaining readers?
Either way, I’d say it’s a pretty subtle approach — and almost as much fun to stumble across as the Bold Christian clothing ad that I found on a previous visit to Islamic Awakening… do you remember that?
My twitteramigo @ckrashas put your tax dollars to work attempting to shatter the stovepipes of analytical excellence in the IC.
And it is pretty cool…..notice how issues of lines of authority and reliability of information are facilitated and made infinitely more efficient with off the shelf Web 2.0.
The nice thing about this project of @ckras is that his model can be generalized to any large organization or system where bureaucratic complexity and the territoriality of guarding tiny empires is gumming up the timely flow of information into the right hands.
Just received a review copy courtesy of Dr. Bunker and James Driscoll of Taylor & Francis – could not have arrived at a better time given several research projects in which I am engaged.
The 237 page, heavily footnoted, book is organized into three sections: Organization and Technology Use by the narcos networks, Silver or Lead on their carrot and stick infiltration/intimidation of civil society and the state apparatus, and Response Strategies for the opponents of the cartels. Bunker’s co-authors Matt Begert, Pamela Bunker, Lisa Campbell, Paul Kan, Alberto Melis, Luz Nagle, John Sullivan, Graham Turbiville, Jr., Phil Wiliams and Sarah Womer bring an array of critical perspectives to the table from academia, law enforcement, intelligence, defense and security fields as researchers and practitioners.
Looks good – will get a full review here at a later date, but a work that will definitely of interest to those readers focusing on national security, COIN, 4GW, irregular or Hybrid war, terrorism, transnational organized crime and black globalization.
Excessively complex representations, much less the bureaucratic systems in practice, are poor vehicles for efficient communication of strategic conceptualizations to the uninformed – such as those downstream who must labor to execute such designs. Or those targeted by them for help or harm. In addition to the difficulty in ascertaining prioritization, the unnaturally rigid complexity of the bureaucracy generally prevents an efficient focus of the system’s resources and latent power. The system gets in it’s own way while eating ever growing amounts of resources to produce less and less, leading to paralysis and collapse.
Does it have to?
Here’s an interesting, very brief take on analytical simplification from a natural scientist and network theorist Dr. Eric Berlow on how to cull simplification – and thus an advantage – out of complex systems by applying an ecological paradigm.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
by Dr. Robert J. Bunker (Ed.)
