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[ by Charles Cameron — gaming the future, rethinking thinking, NPS essay contest, mixing drinks ]
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I’d like to introduce what may be a new format for my DoubleQuotes and SPECS. It features two ideas — in this case, the telephone and the game console — which merge into one via some overlap between them — here, the iPhone.

You want the neurosciwence behind all this? Try Fauconnier and Turner‘s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities.

It was a piece by Benjamin Kohlmann in today’s Small Wars Journal titled The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers that triggered this post.

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Listen up:

The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits.  The mind that can see that a phone and entertainment device can be intertwined into something like, say, an iPhone.  Or, an intellect that recognizes how secondary and tertiary networks are often more valuable than first-order relationships, thus creating something like LinkedIn.  Or the strategist who understands that crowdsourced, horizontally structured non-state actors pose a greater threat to our security than Nation states.

That’s from today’s Small Wars Journal piece — and when I read that paragraph, I was way too excited to read the rest, because:

1. That’s what my series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] on Arthur Koestler‘s notion of intersecting concepts has been all about, and…

2. I’ve been working on a family of games that will train people — pleasurably — in precisely this kind of “overlap” thinking for at least fifteen years now. Don Oldenberg of the Washington Post described one of my games as an “on-line match of ricocheting intellects” back in 1996.

But you’ll be hearing more on #2 in the not too distant, once our team has all its ducks in a row — and black swans permitting.

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Hey, this kind of thinking can get you noticed — it’s what last year’s Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security essay contest [link opens .pdf] boiled down to:

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If you’ll permit me a quick detour:

Not only that, it’s also the basis for cocktail hour!

It appears that the Bartender’s Guide was first published in 1862, so bartenders have been doing this — mixing ideas, mixing drinks — for at least a century and a half. Maybe the fact that they work with liquor has something to do with it.

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In any case, isn’t it time for the rest of us to catch up?

The future lies with those individuals who can see connections across a myriad of professions and intellectual pursuits.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

image of the awaited Twelfth Imam from Tehran Times

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Here’s a report on remarks President Ahmadinejad made in celebration of the anniversary of the Iranian revolution, just hours before President Mubarak quit, from this morning’s Washington Post:

The crisis that has been roiling Egypt, a key U.S. ally in the region, dominated Friday’s celebration. Ahmadinejad said that the 12th imam Mahdi, a revered 9th-century Shiite saint, had directed the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.”

This is a global revolution, managed by the imam of the ages,” he told the crowds gathered in and around Tehran’s central Azadi Square.

He predicted the formation of a world government, ruled by the 12th imam: “Hearts and beliefs are swiftly leaning toward forming a global governance and the necessity of the rule of the perfect human, linked to the heavens.”

h/t @IbnSiqilli

I really should have seen that one coming!

[ by Charles Cameron ]

“The only people celebrating at the Pentagon last week were the Mexicans working on renovating the building.”                               –  Dr. Loren Thompson

It takes a rare class of wit to combine an allusion to an ethnic minority group while shilling for a fabulously overpaid and notoriously dysfunctional industry that is anxious that we are spending too much money on the war wounded. Full story at Danger Room.

Remember people, every dollar wasted on caring for a critically injured combat veteran, or on a pay raise that keeps a private’s family off of food stamps is a dollar that could have gone to cost overruns or a desperately needed executive bonus.

From the Washington Post via the SWJ Blog:

“The choices suggest that the unusual decision to put the top U.S. officer in Iraq in charge of the promotions board has generated new thinking on the qualities of a successful Army officer — and also deepened Petraeus’s imprint on the Army. Petraeus, who spent nearly four of the past five years in Iraq and has seen many of the colonels in action there, faces confirmation hearings next week to take charge of Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Army Secretary Pete Geren asked Petraeus to head the board, which convened in late 2007, and instructed it to stress innovation in selecting a new generation of one-star generals, the officers said. Several of the colonels widely expected to appear on the resulting promotion list, which has not yet been released, are considered unconventional thinkers who were effective in the Iraq campaign, in many cases because they embraced a counterinsurgency doctrine that Petraeus helped craft, the officials said.

They include Special Forces Col. Ken Tovo, a veteran of multiple Iraq tours who recently led a Special Operations task force there; Col. H.R. McMaster, a senior Petraeus adviser known for leading a successful counterinsurgency effort in the Iraqi city of Tall Afar, and Col. Sean MacFarland, who created a network of patrol bases in Ramadi that helped curb violence in the capital of Anbar Province, according to the officers. “

General Petraeus has been given an opportunity to shape the worldview of the Army in a way that is historically, quite rare. The USAF being formed out of the old Army Air Force in the aftermath of WWII with a strategic bomber, “Air Power” ethos is one example. Another would be General Marshall’s handiwork as the father of the “Benning revolution” and the architect of the mighty WWII U.S. Army, where he ruthlessly cashiered deadwood, timeservers and elderly colonels to make way for a new generation of rising talent.

The scale of Petraeus’ efforts are far smaller, of course, as the current Army is only a fraction of it’s Cold War size, to say nothing of Marshall’s gigantic force built by conscription; but it looks like Pertaeus will leave his mark on the institution of the U.S. Army as surely as did Marshall.