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Saw the The Dark Knight yesterday. Heath Ledger’s performance lived up to the hype, arguably the best movie villain since Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, but Ledger made an otherwise strong cast look weak by comparison, except for Gary Oldman’s understated, just an honest cop, rendition of Commissioner Gordon.

While having the Joker as the point of origin was a nice touch, I thought that the character of Twoface, one of Batman’s major villains, might have been handled better by compacting the story and leaving a full exploration of Dent’s mad descent for the next movie in the series.

Kind a quick today.

Top Billing! SWJ Blog – Is Counterinsurgency the Graduate Level of War?  & Counterinsurgency Principles for the Diplomat

Sean Meade at ARES – Aviation Week F-22 Farnborough Video

An amazing plane, no argument. Next gen tech when our adversaries still don’t have last gen ( maybe the Air force will use it against the Marines 😉  )

The Duck of Minerva –  War and punishment (Dr. Dan) & Why Not Assassinate Mugabe? Why Not To. (Dr. Charli)

Vibrant discussion in the Mugabe post, some CTLab compadres there as well.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Globalizations means fewer wars, less death

A nice antidote to the Stiglitz I am reading.

CTLab – Afghanistan ’96: The Legacy of Information Failures  (Bleuer)

Foreign Policy – The World’s Top 20 Public Intellectuals

Quite a weird list, dominated by Muslim scholars, some of whom are globally known like Tariq Ramadan and others who are obscure, at least to me. Few scientists or economists made the cut.

tdaxp.com – Some Thoughts on Creative Self-Efficacy

Dan drills down on creativity research

Sally K. Horn in Foreign Service – Rewarding Functional Policy Expertise

Horn takes on the cocked up personnel system and career incentives for FSO’s.

Dr. Steven Metz  at SSI –  Expand the U.S. Military? Not So Fast (PDF)

Op-ed piece. SWC member Metz calls for spending on a wider range of options than just more boots

Hayden B. Peake – Studies in Intelligence – The Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf

Books of interest reviewed by Peake.

On Culberson-Capuano-Congressional Internet Rules:

Cybersecurity expert and blogfriend Gunnar Peterson of 1 Raindrop posted up:

Dems were for Web 2.0 before they were against it

Looks like a good diversion from normal critical DC wealth destroying activities, and baseball steroid and NFL team filming practices investigations

On the Nuclear Blog Tank:

Twitteramigo Fester at The Newshoggers has weighed in:

What’s the value of a few nukes…

Now if the warhead design is advanced enough to be reduced in size enough to be mounted on either ballistic missiles or on tactical aircraft and the national political leadership has confidence that those warheads can be delivered to their targets, the equation changes. A minimal counter-value deterrant doctrine could be developped.  However since there are very few weapons and very few delivery systems, this deterrant is still minimal or non-credible.  It has the thinnest patina of credibility if the delivery force is highly mobile, highly camoflaged and highly available.  However this force is still a very tempting pre-emptive strike target as only a few targets actually need to be hit to dramatically decrease the probability of a weapon getting airborne.  Also in this scenario, I am assuming some nations will have decent air defense and IRBM and SRBM defenses along the lines of PAC-3 or S-300 systems.  The small nuclear force is not a survivable second strike deterrant, nor even a particulary credible first strike counter-value pre-pre-emptive deterrant. 

On MMORPG:

Jamais Cascio at Open the Future:

Needed: Game Masters/Community Leaders for Superstruct

The Institute for the Future is hiring five community leaders/game masters for the upcoming future forecasting game Superstruct.

….Your job will be to lead a team of players (at minimum, hundreds of players; more likely, thousands of players) in creating a collaborative online forecast of the year 2019. The forecasting will take place through wikis, forums, videos, blogs, Twitter, online comics, photo sets, and whatever else our players use to depict and talk about the future. You’ll be reading and watching lots of player-created content, in addition to making your own content. You’ll give the players feedback, and you’ll synthesize and summarize the most interesting things in a short weekly story. You’ll be moderating forums and wikis dedicated to solving a particular future-problem. You’ll have to help your community manage a careful balance between “wow, the future might be scary” storytelling to “you know what, we might actually be able to solve this problem before it kills us all” optimism. Because the game isn’t just about imagining the future. It’s about inventing the future. This game is a kind of working prototype for the year 2019!

Falling on the heels of the Bacevich post, MIT’s  Dr. Barry Posen’s testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee for oversight calls for ” Restraint and Renewal” (PDF – guess not too many interventionists received a subcommittee invite).

Posen is a sharp thinker who aims here to deflate comfortable assumptions and a number of sacred cows – like the existence of NATO or security relationships with Israel and Japan. While much of his critique of American excess is reasonable, Posen’s alternative quasi-non interventionist grand strategy is predicated, like others in this vein, on lowballing estimates of the negative, unintended, consequences on an American strategic retraction on this scale. America pulling out of NATO military command and loosening ties with Japan and Israel will cause ripple effects in the international order.

Hat tip to Wiggins.

Hat tip to Jessica at Solvation.