Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
BLOGGING THE LEBANON WAR UPDATE
Some interesting blog posts by
Austin Bay ( Top billing for addressing the Westphalian aspects)
In no particular order….
Archive for 2006
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
DUCKWALKING WITH HERMAN KAHN AND NEWT GINGRICH
Rodger Payne at The Duck of Minerva had a clever post “ Ladder of Escalation” that tied two colorful intellects, the late Herman Kahn and the very alive Newt Gingrich, to the stategic implications of the Terror War. On Gingrich’s recent comments, Rodger writes:
“In any case, Kahn is known for a number of interesting ideas, including the so-called “ladder of escalation.” Essentially, Kahn’s term explains gradations of conflict, from “ostensible crisis” up 40+ rungs to “spasm” thermonuclear war.
Such a spasm is to be avoided, obviously.
While Kahn developed the ladder as part of his critique of the “massive retaliation” doctrine of the Eisenhower administration, the notion of “winnable” nuclear war-fighting took on a life of its own during 1970s and 1980s strategic debates.
I’m referencing Kahn because he also reminds us that crises, conflicts and wars can escalate — perhaps in unexpected ways, though Kahn was a game theorist and wanted to think rationally about the unthinkable.
To some extent, Kahn was right. Leaders and scholars do have to think about the possible, not merely the probable.
…I’m not writing this to scare anyone, but I do think it is patently obvious that world leaders ought to be doing everything they can to try to de-escalate the current ongoing crises.”
De-escalation, incidentally, is a major tactical prescription of 4GW school of thought, specifically William Lind’s (I’ll try to find the link), for states in implementing a defensive and isolating strategy against non-state opponents. I don’t agree with isolation in the way Lind used it because it simply isn’t physically possible or economically desirable, but political and moral isolation and de-legitimization of the enemy is another matter. As I remarked in the comment section at the Duck:
“The statements are classic Gingrich; an important and substantially correct analytical perspective delivered in a rhetorically couterproductive manner.
Gingrich is 100 % correct that our bureaucratic response to the geopolitical crisis with Islamism is tardily done and is cognitively inadequate to the complexity of the task at hand. He’s also right that we have an interrelated mix of state sponsors, societal substate sponsors within allied states and non-state actors that confounds our traditional approaches to war and diplomacy.
Unfortunately, the “WWIII” rhetoric that Gingrich is using to accurately denote the *magnitude* of the crisis to an American audience and get people’s attention misfires overseas where we want to isolate and politically discredit the Salafi-Jihadi lunatics from even socially conservative, pious but peaceful Middle-Class Muslims. It is WWIII only in terms of difficulty or importance but not “Us vs. Them ” like with the Soviets.
We need to light a fire under our own side without making our enemies look like the “good guys” to their home audience in the process. Escalate our strategic operational response while de-escalating their emotional response.”
Find another way to light the fire, but “WWIII” or “WWIV” terminology should be junked unless we think that energizing Osama Bin Laden’s base for him instead of demoralizing it is a good idea.
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
ROBB ON RAY KURZWEIL AND BILL JOY
John Robb has a very interesting post up, “Recipe for Destruction” on the Kurzweil-Joy NYT op-ed “Recipe for Destruction“.
Tuesday, July 18th, 2006
ON THE FUTURE OF BLOGGING AND SOME TOOLS
Recently, Dr. Daniel Nexon delivered his first video broadcast at The Duck of Minerva. Dan did a nice job for his first time out and while he may not have been as smooth as a CNN talking head he was far more substantive. A couple of weeks previously, Dan of tdaxp was the subject of an an extended podcast interview by Phil Jones which was enlightening and interesting, reminding me somewhat of Dr. Milt Rosenberg’s WGN720 radio show.
It is apparent that blogging is evolving toward a multimedia presentation of personal expression requiring a combination of platforms and media that are called “mash-ups“. What we see today is likely to look crude and primitive five years from now, perhaps less. Even so Bloggers will be wanting tools to organize the flow of information. Here are two:
The first is the GRAZR, the odd window that appeared on my blog margin a while back. My grazr is not currently being utilized to any great extent because I set it only to feed Discover The Rules, a blog for a project with Critt Jarvis, now on the backburner. If I wished, I could have bundles of feeds, podcasts, dynamic reading lists, files and a number of other possible options. There is also a grazr blog for the geek inclined.
Secondly, there’s an open source aggregation manager Blogbridge that also is starting a Blogbridge Feed Library . Even I, with my limited technical aptitude, found Blogbridge easy to begin using. I have not used aggregators all that much in the past because I don’t do news of the day blogging per se but Blogbridge has search tools that can be pre-set for topics I’m interested in and save me time.
Thanks to Critt for connecting me, once again, with new tech ideas.
Monday, July 17th, 2006
COMPLEXITY, NETWORKS, SECURITY AND UNCERTAINTY
Not initially what I logged on to write about but interesting enough to merit passing along.
“Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information” at Transformation/DefenseLink
” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.
…“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said….Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog. Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers thereby allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about in just the same way that one can discover the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are the most cited in research papers.
…The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research emphasis – incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive design, and active querying; and cognitive processing.
…“Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related to a particular focus,” Kokar said. Timeliness has to do with immediacy – how important is a topic now. “Credibility,” he continued, “is the amount of trust you have in an information source.”
“Credibility” ? Hmmm…I can think of a few big name blogs who won’t make the cut there. But then again neither, would CBS.
I would be intrigued to know how much weight here is being given to the information derived from aggregate patterns (or for that matter the pattern of the blogosphere as a whole and those of the Left vs. Right blogospheres) relative to drilling down to those blogs given 4 star credibility ratings. I would also speculate that the military and IC are very interested in discovering the “deep influencer” blogs – those that consistently or frequently demonstrate an ability to initiate the spread of new memes.
(Indirect Hat tip to YH)
Secondly, from Bruce Schneier – ” Complexity and Terrorism Investigations“:
“The Committee’s report accepts that the increasing number of investigations, together with their increasing complexity, will make longer detention inevitable in the future. The core calculation is essentially the one put forward by the police and accepted by the Government – technology has been an enabler for international terrorism, with email, the Internet and mobile telephony producing wide, diffuse, international networks. The data on hard drives and mobile phones needs to be examined, contacts need to be investigated and their data examined, and in the case of an incident, vast amounts of CCTV records need to be gone through. As more and more of this needs to be done, the time taken to do it will obviously climb, and as it’s ‘necessary’ to detain the new breed of terrorist early in the investigation before he can strike, more time will be needed between arrest and charge in order to build a case.
All of which is, as far as it goes, logical. But take it a little further and the inherent futility of the route becomes apparent – ultimately, probably quite soon, the volume of data overwhelms the investigators and infinite time is needed to analyse all of it. And the less developed the plot is at the time the suspects are pulled in, the greater the number of possible outcomes (things they ‘might’ be planning) that will need to be chased-up. Short of the tech industry making the breakthrough into machine intelligence that will effectively do the analysis for them (which is a breakthrough the snake-oil salesmen suggest, and dopes in Government believe, has been achieved already), the approach itself is doomed. Essentially, as far as data is concerned police try to ‘collar the lot’ and then through analysis, attempt to build the most complete picture of a case that is possible. Use of initiative, experience and acting on probabilities will tend to be pressured out of such systems, and as the data volumes grow the result will tend to be teams of disempowered machine minders chained to a system that has ground to a halt. This effect is manifesting itself visibly across UK Government systems in general, we humbly submit. But how long will it take them to figure this out? “
Some degree of probability analysis might be a start. Speaking of which…..
“Robust Decision Methodology for Reasoning Under Deep Uncertainty“
Despite the sexy title this not a ponderous tome but a sparkly powerpoint presentation. Worth looking at because time, politics, stress and human frailty causes us all to take cognitive short-cuts from time to time ( or in some cases, all the time). Echoes things I have read in Studies in Intelligence. Perhaps Art can be enticed to comment ?
UPDATE:
Curtis recommends the following article on Brain-nanotech interface and I agree.
