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In mt previous  post, The Reading List of Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, I asked for reader suggestions on new additions to the list and you responded both here and at Chicago Boyz. Here is what you offered up:

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations  [ Jeremiah ]

War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage  [ Wiggins ]

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game  [ Wiggins ]

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference  [ Glenn ]

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking   [  Glenn ]

Explaining Chaos  [ Munzenberg ]

From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation  [ Munzenberg ]

The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)                        [  Munzenberg  ]

Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization  [ Eddie – can’t find his second rec on Amazon]

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web Application   [ Jeffrey ]

The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman                  [ Jeffrey ]

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable      [ Adrian – this was also a Hammes rec that I missed in my last post]

Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band.      [ Adrian ]

Daemon             [ Arherring ]

Halting State (Ace Science Fiction)    [ Arherring ]

The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War                   [ A.E. ]

City Fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam   [ A.E. ]

Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers       [ A.E. ]

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets    [ David Foster ]

The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth                  [ David Foster ]

Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (Financial Times Prentice Hall Books.)   [ David Foster ]

The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society      [ David Foster ]

The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations  [ David Foster ]

Order Out of Chaos   [ Shannon Love ]

And here are mine:

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century  

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History Series) 

UPDATE:

Blogfriend and cybersecurity expert Gunnar Peterson steps up with his own list.

This was very cool and probably not that far off.  

Hat tip to Open the Future.

Danger Room was most excellent today. Two items here worthy of attention:

Michael Tanji, my CTLab colleague, put in an appearance at Danger Room with How to Fix the Spooks’ New ‘Vision’:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released their new vision for the future of the spooks and spies community. And, shockingly enough, it’s actually pretty smart — sparking a bit of optimism for those who think serious change is too long in coming. It’s a more far-reaching document than I have seen come out of the IC (Intelligence Community) in the past. The parts about supplying intelligence to everyone from the Departments of Health and Human Services to international organizations to private sector and non-governmental organizations were especially heartening.

That said, it still doesn’t reach far enough. Everyone in the IC likes to say that we’re in a period of unprecedented and extensive change. If that’s the case, I’d expect the response to match the challenge. Some suggestions:

They’re good ones. Go read them!

Next, Noah Shachtman brings us some official Pentagon futurism pried loose by Justin Elliott of Mother Jones magazine with a FOIA request, Military Study Looked to Rome for Lessons:

The Pentagon’s legendary Office of Net Assessment is known for peering into the future of conflict — at subjects like wartime biotech, fighting robots, networked battles, and the military in space. The office’s head, Andrew Marshall, has been called the Pentagon’s “futurist-in-chief.” But for one study, concluded in 2002, Net Assessment-funded researchers looked back, to the empires of Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France.

 Military Advantage in History  (PDF) is a fascinating read but very quirky in it’s historical interpretation. I base this assessment on a spot check of the Roman section where some elements are correct but some variables are underplayed – the political dynamics of proconsular authority begetting Roman aggressiveness and adaptiveness in the field or the resilience of the Roman state for example. The rush to try and synthesize such a vast scope of history in a few paragraphs will inevitably create distortions ( Napoleon or Alexander are far more manageable subjects for such abstraction – but they influenced rather than institutionalized in the long run).

For those in need of primary source material for researching the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, there is a wealth of material, much of it newly released, in audio and transcripted form at Nixontapes.org.

Hat tip to H-Diplo.

Matt Armstrong has a must-read analytical, IO piece up at CTLab Review:

New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation

…New Media is more than 24/7 news cycles. It is the ability to create trusted peer relationships, or the appearance of, to create legitimacy of information as well as depth and breadth of acceptance. This can be done as traditional media or other new media outlets pick up on a bit of “news” for redistribution, giving the impression of validity as the sources go up from one to many, often in excess of the three needed to create a “fact.” It is easier to see you’re not alone in the New Media environment, something that was not possible with radios and film (unless you risked gathering as a group).

There are several defining characteristics of the new media environment. The obvious are hyperconnectivity, persistence of information, inexpensive reach, and dislocation with speaker and listener virtually close but geographically distant. New Media also democraticizes information in the sense that hierarchies are bypassed, permitting both direct access to policy and decision makers and the possibility of “15-minutes of fame” (if even only one minute or less) to everyone. Information can be created and consumed by everyone regardless of “eliteness,” CV, and at minimal cost to any party.

All true and well said. Matt however points to a seldom recognized but critical variable here:

To the insurgent and terrorist, New Media’s capacity to amplify and increase the velocity of an issue that is critical. They increasingly rely on the Internet’s ability to share multiple kinds of media quickly and persistently to permit retrieval across time zones around the world from computers or cell phones. The value is the ability to not just persuade an audience to support their action, but to mobilize their support and to facilitate their will to act on behalf of the group (or not to act on behalf of another group, such as the counterinsurgent).

Velocity is very important in many senses. An accelerating message tempo heightens the sense of crisis in the mind of the audience so long as it does not move so quickly as to slide into unfiltered “noise”. Control of velocity also permits the exploitation of “information lag” in slower moving hierarchies or audiences. Finally, this velocity is really “alinear”; the ability of new media tools to “mash-up” entirely unrelated events separated by time, distance and circumstance and synthesize them out of context permits the scoring of tactical propaganda victories.

Read all of Matt’s post here.