Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006
BLOGGING NOTE
Having a few computer problems today…..
Archive for 2006
Monday, January 2nd, 2006
MILITARY NETCENTRICITY ON VIDEO
The Office of Force Transformation has a video brief online on Network-Centric Warfare based on the work of the late theorist Vice-Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski.
The production quality level is high but the narrator is annoyingly wooden. His presence does not help the brief at all and reminded me of Soviet TV news anchors circa 1985 crossbred with CNN talking heads. Just turn off the sound and click through the brief.
Sunday, January 1st, 2006
MORE ON AL QAIDA’S WESTERN CONVERT STRATEGY
An excellent article in The Washington Post today examines Western converts to radical Salafism who rose to become significant operational figures in European al Qaida cells. Noteworthy are two aspects:
1. The blending of Islamist radical political objectives with criminal network objectives by these Western converts.
2. The prominence of the psychological motivation for the converts:
“Pascal Mailhos, director of the French national police intelligence agency, said in an interview with Le Monde newspaper in November that there were about 5,000 Muslims in France who had adopted extremist beliefs. Of those, about 400 are converts, he said.
“The phenomenon is on the rise, and we are very alarmed,” Mailhos said. “The process is often very quick and offers these dysfunctional young adults a new way of organizing their lives.”
WaPo quotes Oliver Roy as well.
