zenpundit.com

DARPA TRYING TO VACUUM THE BLOGOSPHERE

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that DARPA has been tasked by the IC with running the blogosphere through a fine-tooth comb in order to look for signs of terrorist communications and open source intelligence.

This raises the possibility that if you want to really inject your ideas into the USG hopper, don’t write your Congressman, just post using as many sensitive keyword combinations as possible so that you will be red-flagged by the NSA system or some other agency’s for actual human attention by an analyst. If you know enough about foreign policy or intelligence to create a
” hook” for a supercomputer, then you probably know enough to write something an intel guy would find interesting too.

THE NEW GREAT GAME

Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, the newest member of Coming Anarchy , has begun a series on the potentialities of Turkic Central Asia entitled The Eastern Question Part I. and Part II. In Part II. Chirol noted:

“To begin, it would be helpful to consider the unofficial border between the West and the East. The modern border between Croatia and Bosnia was long the frontier of Europe, separating Austria-Hungary from the Ottomans and also Christianity from Islam. Later after World War II, the line was pushed back to West Germany, Austria and Italy separating not culture and religion, but two ideologies. Today, in 2005, the border extends from Estonia almost directly south past Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia, a significant shift. And while overlapping EU members with NATO members creates the de facto border, it is a very porous one these days in terms of cultural and economic influence.”

An timely observation. In the comments of section of Part I. at Coming Anarchy, I drew attention to the following possible dichotomy for Central Asia, Turkey and the West:

“An interesting set of questions will be if Turkey can maintain its adherence to secularism or will grow more Islamist. Secondly if Turkish involvement will lead to a revival of “Pan-Turkism” and investment in the Turkish identity among the Turks or if a ” Pan-Turanism” is established that makes Turkey a synthesizing transmission belt of European and Western ideas to their cousins further East.”

I’m less confident that Turkey’s Westernization and secularism established by Ataturk can completely avoid being eroded by creeping Islamism as the Turkish military recededs politically in favor of democratization. Particularly if Turkey, after jumping through a series of pride-injuring hoops, ends up being rebuffed for EU membership. I forsee a very, very, bad popular reaction in Turkey if that eventuallity should come to pass. It would be helpful, if the U.S. took some complementary moves to strengthen Turkey’s identification as a member of the Core rather than leave the question entirely in the laps of the Europeans.

As for Central Asia there are six and soon to be seven or eight powers competing for influence in the next quarter century: Russia fearfully watching its ” near abroad”; Turkey; Iran reaching toward Shiites and Dari-speakers; Saudi Arabia proselytizing Salafism in Sufi territory; the United States, seeking GWOT bases and oil and gas deals and the EU, seeking to expand the EU values model eastward. With their energy requirements, China and India will soon join in, jockeying for influence as well. That’s a large number of 800 pound gorillas in a relatively small playground.

The United States needs to leverage a combination of players with congruent minimum goals in Central Asia that emphasize connectivity – a non-zero sum outcome for the West, Russia and China that shuts out Islamism and spurs liberalization, stability and markets.

ADDENDUM: Zenpundit wishes to welcome Coming Anarchy’s newest partner, Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, to the blogosphere

MARC SCHULMAN

Has his next installment – The EU and the Arabs IV — War, Oil, EAD -up….with an intriguing trio of sources !

TO THINK STRATEGICALLY YOU MUST THINK SYSTEMICALLY

Albert Einstein spent his later years grasping at a way to present a neat, comprehensive, unified theory of physics that could explain the nature of the universe. He did not succeed, no at that time could have, though some physicists believe they are on the right track to do so. Einstein’s technique, viewing the whole field as a single interconnected system, remains the most valuable one for thinking strategically because it forces the strategist to consider the implications of each move from every angle. What do I mean by systemic thinking ? Some examples:

Stuart Berman has applied Dr. Barnett’s PNM theory to develop an analysis of internet security as a total system, asking in his presentation, if we are vulnerable to a ” Cyber 9-11 “. ( Take the time to view the powerpoint – the first part reviews PNM, the latter section applies it to cybersecurity) It’s an appropriate question because we know that most states but most energetically China are experimenting with cyberwarfare as a way to balance the scales with the United States by gaining the capacity to ” blind” the hyperadvanced, netcentric warfare capabilities of the Pentagon. The Chinese have also launched cyberattack experiments against Taiwan and Japan.

Pundita in turn has been examining the disconnect that occurs when the engineering of complex human systems takes place:

a) When the designers are far removed from the political decision makers – a severing of vision from power.

b) When the designers do not take into account that the success of their system naturally is going to have consequences, forseeable as well as unintended. Or as Pundita put it:

“With hindsight, the decisions–taken without modeling how they would play out if successful–were idiotic. The knowledge about how to project scenarios was out there; it simply wasn’t used. That’s the kind of idiocy in government we can, and must, learn to avert. That is the greatest challenge for this era.”

Herman Kahn would have agreed. And finally Pundita calls for the development of a formal discipline of large-scale system design.

Some strategists have thought along these lines, notably Sun-Tzu and his modern disciple John Boyd, the father of the OODA decision cycle. For moderns this kind of thinking requires a retraining – perhaps causing a neural rewiring – of brains educated to habitually compartmentalize, isolate, deconstruct and analyze knowledge into vertical hierarchies of information. What is needed is the horizontal thinking exemplified by Barnett’s PNM theory – synthesis, pattern recognition, analogies, intuition – to cut across the artificial boundaries we have raised for ourselves to see the connections and the overarching meta-principles that make the global system run.

Or break down.

THE RAMSHACKLE REGIME OF DR. BASHAR

The Chicago Tribune deserves kudos for investing in doing more in-depth reporting in the Mideast, running multi-page articles periodically, the latest being on Syria’s opthamologist-dictator, Bashar Assad.

Reader’s Digest version – for an eye doctor, Bashar should see outcomes more clearly.