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On War by Carl von Clausewitz has been the most influential book on strategy and war of all time.

We can say this because On War is the standard by which all other works of strategy are measured and only a few compared – notably Sun Tzu’s Art of War and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. The odd thing is that we can say this despite the fact that On War is more frequently shelved, cited or understood secondhand rather than read, even by military professionals. And furthermore, within the narrow demographic that reads Clausewitz seriously and critically, there can be heated dispute over what he meant, due to the difficulty of the text. Then there are the secondary effects, historical and military, of Clausewitz having been misunderstood, forgotten, ignored or at times, his strategic philosphy consciously rejected.

The shadow cast by On War is all the more remarkable given it’s circumstances of publication. Clausewitz died in 1831, at fifty-one, of cholera, having finally risen to a military post his talents merited. He had been writing On War since 1816 and it was far from completed or refined to his satisfaction and it is highly unlikely, in my view, that Clausewitz would have consented to it’s publication in the condition in which he left it. His determined and intellectually formidible widow, Marie von Clausewitz, further shaped the manuscript of On War, guided by her intimate knowledge of her husband’s ideas and was likely the best editor Clausewitz could have posthumously had.

Nevertheless, to my mind On War remains a magnificent unfinished symphony.

What would On War have looked like if Clausewitz had lived another twenty-five or thirty some years? Assuming continued good health, Clausewitz would have seen, perhaps commanded in, the First Schleswig War and at least studied the Crimean War from afar. He would have had another quarter-century of reading and mature reflection on his subject. Clausewitz, who had a keen understanding of history, would have also witnessed the grand European upheaval of liberal revolution in 1848 that rocked the Hohenzollern monarchy to it’s core. What new insights might Clausewitz have gleaned or expanded upon? Would his later chapters On War have evolved to equal the first?

Having outlived Marie (who died in 1836), would Clausewitz have become a deeply changed man?

What I find it difficult to believe is that Clausewitz, with his creatively driven and philosophically exacting mind,  would have been content to let the manuscript of On War rest where it stood in 1831. Or that we read today what Carl von Clausewitz ultimately intended.

 [by J. Scott Shipman]

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson, the acclaimed author of biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, has produced a definitive and up-close biography of Steve Jobs. The book is a very readable 571 pages that took only a couple of days to read. Jobs approached Isaacson to write his bio in 2004, but Isaacson resisted until 2009 when  Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell “said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now.”” Isaacson insists no restrictions were placed on him, in fact, Jobs and his wife facilitated access to many people who do did not hold Jobs in high regard—the man excited passions good and bad. I found it ironic that Jobs, a man who obsessed with control would willingly relinquish control in what will probably be the definitive biography of his life.

Isaacson offered early that his book is really about innovation. He offers: “At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation.” Given Apple’s growth, his point is well taken.

Isaacson clearly admires Jobs, but he does not spare the reader of Jobs volatile and brutal out-bursts directed at just about anyone he considered a “bozo” or worse. From the beginning, Jobs was a very difficult person to work with. He did not tolerate mediocrity and punished what he thought was mediocre thinking, often publicly. Isaacson offers some insights and ideas as to the cause of Jobs distinctly caustic personality, but most ring hollow. Jobs was a driven and passionate man, with very little empathy—even for family members. Isaacson suggests “people who were not crushed ended up being stronger” and many of the folks interviewed agreed—Jobs drove people to do things they didn’t know they could do. As one of Jobs colleagues Debi Coleman said, “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.” So the folks he didn’t scare off, appear to have been inspired. Tim Cook, Jobs’ successor offered, “What I learned about Steve was that people mistook some of his comments as ranting or negativism, but it was really just the way he showed passion. So that’s how I processed it, and I never took issue personally.”

My favorite parts of the book were Isaacson’s liberal use of quotes from Jobs. Some quotes bristle with passion, and a few were profound. This one appealed to my notions on pattern cognition:

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases,  people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

Isaacson covers Jobs journey at Apple, NeXT, Pixar, and his triumphant return to Apple. I did not know much about Jobs at Pixar and found it interesting that Jobs was CEO at both companies simultaneously—and both companies had a “different” versions of Jobs. Isaacson says, “Pixar was a haven where Jobs could escape the intensity of Cupertino. At Apple, the managers often excitable and exhausted, Jobs tended to be volatile, and people felt nervous about where they stood with him….It was a Pixar that he learned to let other creative people flourish and take the lead.” Jobs was more hands-on at Apple I sense because he considered it his creation—essentially an extension of his person. I suspect Jobs viewed his role at Pixar as more that of a steward in comparison.

Jobs hated slide presentations (I agree—one great thing about Boyd & Beyond is the general ban on PowerPoint) and said, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” There is a poignant passage towards the end where Jobs was meeting with his team of doctors and the doctor had a PowerPoint presentation. Jobs gently suggested the Apple Keynote program was better.

Jobs, despite his bristly exterior, reached deep in his Zen training and life experience (particularly after his cancer diagnosis) when he spoke at the 2005 Stanford commencement:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices of life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.  

We are a Apple/MacBook Pro family, we have iPhones, iPods, and the iPad on our wish list. Isaacson discusses one thing I’ve noticed with every Apple purchase; the thought put into packaging of the product. Apple packaging is patented and it shows. Jobs alter ego and head Apple designer Jonathan Ive, said, “Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging…I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.” I believe we have kept every box our Apple products arrived in—they are works of art.

This book will elicit the spectrum of emotions, there are parts where I was embarrassed or appalled at Jobs poor behavior, there were tender moments towards the end of his storied life that brought a tear to my eye. Isaacson has given us a valuable portrait of a man mathematician Mark Kac “called a magician genius, someone whose insights came out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.”

Isaacson’s Steve Jobs comes with my highest recommendation.

NOTE: This is admittedly a different book review for this site. I’ll admit up front that I’m a fan of Jobs and his products—and I know many people hate him passionately and with good reason. I’m sharing this review because Jobs was an iconoclast very similar to John Boyd: people either loved him or hated him. Both men were driven, had poor people skills, and both left rich legacies in completely different areas, and are eminently interesting figures.

Need some help with a project at work. 

Looking to assemble a fast-and-dirty reading list for laymen that deals with the following topics:

Social intelligence, Emotional self-regulation, Emotion and learning, De-escalation of conflict, Attention, Self-Efficacy

Interested in both academic (for reference) and middlebrow (for distribution) titles, particularly those that contain interpersonal strategies and organizational culture angles. Links to journal or magazine articles or whatever else you deem useful will also be appreciated.

Fire away, the more the better.

The Emily Updates: One Year in The Life of a Girl Who Lived by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Grand strategist and author Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett has published a starkly different book with The Emily Updates, an e-book series that turns away from abstractions of geopolitical strategy and to a deeply personal kind of conflict, his daughter Emily Barnett’s battle with advanced pediatric cancer. Culled from a blog originally written by Tom and his wife Vonne Meussling-Barnett to keep family and friends appraised of the details of Emily’s medical treatment, the series paints an intimate portrait of parental desperation and the amazing grace of a toddler facing a life-threatening disease.

There are two sizable groups of people who will react most strongly to The Emily Updates : parents of young children and those who have faced cancer themselves, or in a loved one. An excerpt:

…Javedan says that her right kidney is enormously enlarged. It is so big that it’s displaced the liver out of its usual spot. That’s what was so confusing in the examinations. There seems to be tumors in or on the kidney.

There’s no need to assume cancer just yet, he says, but he mentions the term Wilms’ Tumor. Javedan orders me to rush Emily to Georgetown within the hour. The head of pediatric surgery and the head of pediatric oncology are already alerted and waiting. The exploratory surgery will be tomorrow morning.

Javedan’s words just froze me: “It’s already been scheduled.”

The doctors will need to run many tests on Emily by the end of the day, so we must hurry. Javedan knows these people. “They are the best,” he assures me.

“Emily will survive,” he is certain.

“It’s wrong to assume she will die, no matter how bad things get in the next hours and days. Remember that,” he counsels.

Quite literally, every parent’s nightmare.

Barnett does not spare the details and The Emily Updates read very much like you are hearing what has just happened in a hospital waiting room or across the Barnett family kitchen table, grueling procedures no child so young should have to go through

Strongly recommended.

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Chicago Boyz – a meander on the perils and promise of research, jihad, typos, books and more ]
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It begins with an email from Lexington Green saying I might be interested in a tweet he had posted earlier this morning:

The Insurance Journal tells us:

Defendants named in the complaint were Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, The Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo and Chechnya, Saudi Red Crescent Society, National Commercial Bank, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Company. Also included as defendants are three Saudi citizens connected to these organizations, Prince Salman Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, Suleiman Abdel Aziz Al Saud and Yassin Al Qadi.

The case is Underwriting Members of Lloyd’s Syndicate 3500 v. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 11-00202, U.S. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania.

Okay, I’m curious. I go to the complaint [.pdf] and start reading… and on page 9, I find:

That’s interesting. A DIA report, better look that up. But there’s no reference provided…

So I googled for “latent penetration” NEI which sent me back to versions of the court filing, and then for “latent penetration” and found that Robert W. Schaefer on p. 166 of his book, The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad, quotes [with minor variations] from what is obviously the same DIA document and in footnote 29, p 165 identifies it as “Declassified DIA intelligence report NC 3095345, October 16, 1998, 3 (obtained through the Freedom of Information Act).”

Onwards to locate NC 3095345, which can be found here [.pdf] and contains the following relevant text on p. 3:

So that’s the source of the description of AQ’s overall plan in the Lloyds complaint.

But what’s “latent penetration”? The DIA document even has it in quote marks – does that make it a technical term?

Back to Google.

The FBI uses the term “latent penetration” – maybe I’m onto something! In their Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification (EBTS) [.pdf] on p. 58 they offer the “following list of TOTs is applicable to latent friction ridge searches transmitted to the FBI”:

I have to admit – a Latent Penetration Query sounds like just the thing I’m after – but the FBI appears to think of “latent penetration” in terms of fingerprints…

Okay, next up. A quick look at David Waterman and Andrew A. Weiss‘ book, Vertical Integration in Cable Television, (AEI, 1997) tells us:

That’s all a bit above my head, and in any case I don’t watch cable TV… and the networks in question aren’t terrorist networks, they’re cable networks…

When I add the word “terror” into my search, however, I get directed to Prof. Kostogryzov Andrey‘s paper [.ppt] addressing the question of a “methodical approach for the evaluation of systems vulnerability in conditions of terrorist threats” for a symposium at the University of Texas, Arlington – which sounds promising.

Searching the good professor’s powerpoint for “latent penetration” takes me to slide 36, however, where I read:

To be honest with you, I don’t feel any closer to understanding “latent penetration” beyond a sort of general “potentially getting inside the opposition” kind of sense.

So let’s get back to NEI – which is what the Lloyds transcription has in parens immediately after the quote-marked phrase “latent penetration” – what’s that about?

Well, on closer examination, it looks as though Lloyds got that wrong, and the DIA document — compare their E’s and F’s in the typed excerpt above and I think you’ll agree — actually says NFI…

Phew! NFI.

What’s that?

The DIA probably classifies its acronyms, but this particular document has been declassified and NFI hasn’t been redacted, so perhaps the Free Dictionary acronym finder will be able to help…

I quickly dismiss such possibilities as National Fatherhood Initiative and get down to my three basic possibilities:

NFI … No Further Information (available)
NFI … National Foreign Intelligence
NFI … No Freaking Idea

The last of these describes my own feelings at this point, although “freaking” would be the milder way to put it. So it’s down to guesswork: I’ll go with #2.

Okay: according to this particular DIA report, AQ “seeks to establish a worldwide Islamic state” by means that include “latent penetration” — I still have only the vaguest idea [OTVI] what that means — and “control over nuclear and biological weapons (Jikhad)”.

Jikhad?

The DIA docu self-describes thus:

Variant spellings, okay…

But I’m wondering if “Jikhad” is one of them…

Back to the search engines, where I discover the word does have prior art in a terrorist – indeed, a specifically AQ — context, to wit:

$149.95, call it $150 on Amazon, and available for free shipping…

Well, you can’t judge a book title by its cover, so I have an inquiry in to the good folks at the University of Calgary library, which has a copy – but I’m guessing “Jikhad” is a typo in both cases, aren’t you?

*

And what grand purpose does all this serve?

None, you may think – the complaint has been withdrawn, as Lex tells us, “without prejudice” – so the issue is, if I may use a legal term despite the fact that IANAL, “moot”.

Unless one is interested in the prices of books these days, or the frequency of spelling vagaries on their printed covers, or possible Arabic words bearing on terrorism that one hasn’t run across previously, or fingerprints, or the reliability of a document of which LTC Schaefer notes (p. 165, n 29):

It is important to note that no evaluation of the information detailed in the report is included in the declassified version; and anyone who deals with intelligence will tell you that text without context is pretext. It is entirely possible that this document was passed to U.S. Intelligence by the Russians in order to bolster the evidence linking the Chechens with Al Qaeda.

On second thoughts, we can learn something here about care in reading sources – about the transmission errors that commonly crop up when texts are translated or transmitted – and about the importance of context.

Text without context is pretext.

That whole paragraph of LTC Schaefer’s is worth the price of admission.