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FROM THE PROJECT ON DEFENSE ALTERNATIVES – THE ISO GATEWAY

Carl Conetta, the director of The Project on Defense Alternatives, was kind enough to alert me to their newly updated International Security Online library, a collection of 7000 documents, monographs, books and reports up to and including the new QDR. I surfed through their section on Network-centric Warfare the other day and found it to be excellent.

If reading military theory PDF files is your idea of a good time – and sadly for me it is – you can get lost for quite some time on ISO, wandering from one area of the intellectual battlespace to another( I even found Zenpundit blogfriend Myke Cole in the terrorism section).

NOT SURE WHO CAN READ THIS BUT…

Having major Blogger issues…word in to help desk already.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE:

Fixed now it seems.

Blogging scheduled for tonight.

RIDDLE ME THIS

I just tormented some colleagues with this. Let’s see if my readers are smarter:

” A man approached the border in a black cadillac. The driver, John Jones, was well-known to customs officials as a suspected smuggler so they went through his car and personal belongings with a fine tooth comb. Under the wheel of the spare tire in the trunk, the customs agents found a small package. Delighted at their discovery they hurriedly unwrapped it and found it contained only some glass beads, a few paper clips and some string. Deeply puzzled, they reluctantly had to let Jones cross over the border.

This process repeated itself, every day, seven days a week for ten years. Every day, customs officials searched Jones’ car and every day they found a small package filled with glass beads, paper clips and string but nothing else. In frustration, the officials began confiscating the package but they had to let Jones continue on his journey and every day he appeared with a new package, always hidden underneath the spare tire.

Then, one day, Jones failed to appear. Nor did he show up the next day or the day after that. In fact he never returned to the border again. Then, one day, a customs official hapened to be on vacation in the neighboring country and he ran into Jones in a bar and approached him in a friendly manner.

” Look here” he bagan ” every day for ten years you crossed the border and we never found a thing. I know you were smuggling something ! What was it ? “

What was Jones smuggling ?

4GW WAR OF WORDS CONTINUES

“The 4GW Scrum Gets Really Ugly” at Opposed System Design

“The Myth of Grand Strategy” by Fabius Maximus at DNI

“Repeat after Me: grand strategy is a LONG TERM pursuit” by Dr. Barnett

“All-Mercenary service?” – thread at the Small Wars Council.

Advocates of the 4GW school of thought, for all their emphasis on the superiority of a defensive posture over an offensive one, appear to be on the warpath lately.

The latest post by Fabius Maximus, while an intriguing writer to be sure, exemplifies a weakness of intellectual culture prevalent in 4GW , namely a fascination with the primarily destructive aspects of Boyd’s strategic theory and a general unwillingness ( Chet Richards excepted) to deeply contemplate the constructive aspects that are implied by Boyd’s ” theme for vitality and growth“. Their “ dialectic engine” seems to be missing a few cylinders these days. It was not always so:

“On one hand, as shown on the previous chart, the National Goal and Grand Strategy tend to be constructive in nature. On the other hand, the Strategic Aim, Strategy, Grand Tactics, and Tactics are destructive in nature and operate over a shorter time frame. In this sense, the upper two and the latter four notions. as expressed, appear to be in disharmony with one another. Yet, application of these latter four strategic and tactical notions permit real leadership to avoid high attrition, avoid widespread destruction, and gain a quick victory”

Good grand strategies are rare, admittedly, but most of those were accomplished by design rather than by default. Bismarck planned, Hitler improvised. The Founding Fathers built, the Jacobins destroyed. Moral cohesion requires more than avoidance of conflict or effective execution of military power – it demands a comprehensible and intellectually compelling vision that can pass from one generation to the next.

It requires the constructive thinking embodied by grand strategy- as Dr. Barnett is doing – and not merely anticipating the destruction of systems.

SOTU

Can’t muster the interest to watch. I may comment on some of the specific proposals.

Example:

70,000 new Math and Science teachers.

Comment:

Great idea as a concept. We sure could use them but market incentives for high level math and hard science skills trend heavily against this ever coming to pass. Engineering careers and computer fields absorb most of our native math talent. This isn’t the same thing as Clinton’s 100,000 cops – the human resource here is not as fungible , hence the shortage. We can’t even import enough immigrants with math degrees to fill our research programs in private industry and at universities, much less the k-12 public schools.

Why teach fresh out of college for $ 22 -29k when someone with a math degree can go to work in the computer industry for twice that and make a salary in four or five years with a Bachelor’s degree what they couldn’t make after 30 years in the public schools with a Ph.D ? I’m not certain how we can have brilliant math and science teachers who are also strangely unaware of basic economics.