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From the auspices of The Warlord, an interesting paper:

UK Ministry of Defence – The Future Character of Conflict (PDF)

Deductions from Themes in Future Conflict

• Future conflict will not be a precise science: it will remain an unpredictable and uniquely human activity. Adversaries (state, state-proxies and non-state) and threats (conventional and unconventional) will blur. The range of threats will spread, with increased proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), cyberspace, and other novel and irregular threats.
• Even during wars of national survival or the destruction of WMD, conflict will remain focused on influencing people. The battle of the narratives will be key, and the UK must conduct protracted influence activity, coordinated centrally and executed locally.
• Maintaining public support will be essential for success on operations. Critical to this will be legitimacy and effective levels of force protection.
• Qualitative advantage may no longer be assumed in the future. Some adversaries may be able to procure adequate quality as well as afford greater quantity, whereas we will be unable to mass sufficient quality or quantity everywhere that it is needed.

I have a great fondness for the British.

They are culturally our close cousins and are a greater people than their recent governments would imply ( the same can largely be said of Americans as well). The current and former administrations have not nurtured the “special relationship” as they should have.

This is of course, an gross understatement: the Obama administration has been at special pains to kick British Prime Ministers in the groin in public ever since they came in to office in 2009. Now, in a fit of ill-considered budgetary niggardliness,  the British are merging part of their military power projection capability with that of France, in order to form something that will be, in case of “future conflict”, completely undeployable. Great.

Just wait, by 2012-2014, the cry in American politics will be ” Who Lost Britain?”

Perhaps we will be too consumed with Mexican narco-insurgency in Texas, Arizona and California  by then to care.

Have not done one of these in quite a while. Overdue.

Top Billing! Robert Paterson – Is America Ruled by an Aristocracy Now? Of course it is!, Politics in America – It is not the Right vs the Left – It’s Them vs Us and The “Dunbar Science” Behind Twitter & Social Leverage

A trio of good posts from Paterson, an excerpt from the last

….All social systems are in effect “Biological Markets” we need other people to care about us to get things that we want.

This is, in effect, what Twitter does, allowing us to do this over time and space at a very low cost in time, effort and dollars.

This realization raised another “aha” for me: we have been here before… the prevailing ideas about how language itself began are rooted in humans finding a cheaper way of grooming. Language enabled us to groom at a distance and left our hands free and our eyes on the look out.

Robin Dunbar (Dunbar Numbers etc) has a theory about the evolution of language that enables us to see tools like Twitter in a new light….

Thomas Ricks –Dueling historians: Lt. Col. Bob Bateman’s takedown of Victor Davis Hanson

Most ZP readers will enjoy this one as the debate between prolific scholar and pundit Victor Davis Hanson and the influential military officer and historian Robert Bateman manages to feature a clash of politics ( conservative vs. liberal), field ( classics vs. military history), historical epoch ( ancient vs. modern) and methodology.

The Glittering Eye – Federal Chief Operating Officer?

Dave Schuler artfully dismantles a superficially clever proposal that is the domestic equivalent of George W. Bush’s “war czar”.

Lexington Green – Before, During and After the Election

An interesting and thoughtful essay from Lex on his experience as the political analogy to the Maytag Repairman – a GOP poll watcher on the mean streets of Chicago’s West Side.

Steve Hynd – The Rich Ate All The Pie – Whatcha Going To Do About It?

In a nod to our friends on the Left, here is Steve at Newshoggers.com en fuego about the exact same data as is Rob Paterson up top.

Thomas P. M. Barnett – Trying to unwind this demonization trend  and Whither Russia: the latest tilt to the West

It seems that Tom’s move to join Wikistrat  has freed him to focus on what he does best – serious geopolitical strategic analysis. While I have always concurred with Dr. Barnett’s emphasis on geoeconomics as an analytical cornerstone, ever since Great Powers his thinking has steadily incorporated greater and deeper historical context. Economics gives the connections and universals, history the particulars and the exceptions. A snippet of Tom on Russian political schizophrenia:

It used to be that these tilts, one way or the other, went on for decades–centuries!  But since Cold War’s end, it seems, like everything else in this networked world, to come and go so much faster.

Yeltsin’s time was an age of aping the West, then Putin led the return back to Russian-ness.  Now Medvedev and others sound the age-old alarm about “falling behind the West/world” and needing to modernize once again.  It’s the same old Westernizers versus Slavophiles debate:  Russia is a failure in its isolation and backwardness and must adopt the ways of the West versus Russia is not a failure but unique and wonderful and the champion of Slavs everywhere and we must stand up to the West and protect our brothers . . . by sucking them into our empire and putting a big wall around them!

If the last bit sounds like some modern-day Islamic radical fundamentalist impulse, it’s because it is very similar.  It’s just an earlier version of rejecting the capitalist west.

That’s it.

A lighthearted exchange in the comments section here last week prompted a reconsideration of the future of this blog. In a modest way, Zenpundit as a personal solo project had a good run.  It is time to move forward and initiate some changes. Perhaps, many changes.

First and foremost, I would like to start by welcoming Charles Cameron as co-blogger. Over the past year or so, Charles has been an increasingly frequent guest poster here, introduced with the short bio:

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute

There is more to Charles than that, which he will make evident in due time. His deep knowledge of theology and comparative religious culture, social psychology and powers of horizontal thinking would make Charles Cameron a welcome addition to any blog, magazine, editorial staff or university faculty. I am extremely pleased to have him here as an author because the insights that Charles can bring to bear on contemporary issues will extend the analytical reach and audience of Zenpundit.

 His body of work here simply speaks for itself.

I’d like to thank Joseph Fouche, T. Greer and Scott Shipman for nudging me in this direction. Also, Lexington Green, who years earlier encouraged me to bring the period of solo blogging to an end and who cordially invited me to break bread at his home with Charles. Sage advice, all.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Cameron.

A work colleague, of great height and formidible baldness, pointed me to a new, dynamic slideware app called Prezi.

While Prezi is interesting in itself for those of you condemned to give briefings and presentations, I was intrigued by one of their showcase demos on metaphors. A first rate, concise, presentation on metaphorical thinking  by Adam Somlai-Fischer; a strong cognitive bent, but very reachable for a general audience.

By the way, you should watch this presentation on “Autoplay” while listening to this:

Mixing Mind and Metaphor on Prezi

National security, or some of the inside-baseball politics thereof, is shifting.

Within hours of the polls closing and buried in the noise over politics:

Control of intelligence budget will shift

NEW ORLEANS – Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Tuesday that he has won a “conceptual agreement” to remove the $53 billion national intelligence budget from Pentagon control and place it under his purview by 2013, as part of an effort to enhance his authority over the U.S. intelligence community.

“To me, it’s a win-win,” he told an audience at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference here. Clapper’s deal with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates would take “$50 billion off the top line” of the Pentagon budget and give the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “more authority and oversight” of the budget. The $27 billion military intelligence budget would remain under the Defense Department, Clapper said.

….With his trademark wry humor, he also said he is bringing back “a certain unnamed intelligence officer from Afghanistan” who wrote a report critical of intelligence gathering there; this officer will help improve intelligence sharing among federal agencies and with state and local agencies. “Hey buddy,” Clapper quipped, “you can help me fix it.” The “buddy” is Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who wrote his report for the Center for a New American Security. He will become an assistant director at the ODNI

The DNI, who garnered a colossal $ 50 billion in budgetary authority over the IC that formerly resided with Defense, gave up turf on “cybersecurity”, seen as a future gold mine by Pentagon contractors.

It is noteworthy, that among the Democratic fallen in the House yesterday was Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a true expert in military affairs with a passion for strategy. Exiting with him are three other moderate Southern Democrats, putting the minority Democrats on Armed Services most likely under the leftist Pelosi ally, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, as new GOP members take over.

Presumably, this intel agreement moves oversight over a vast chunk of sensitive IC activity away from Armed Services to the House Intelligence Committee. Hard to say now exactly to what extent. It would also take defending these programs off of Secretary Gate’s plate when the budget knives come out and into the lap of the DNI and the White House.

Finally, I will add that CNAS is emerging as the equivalent of the RAND of the 21st century.