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Heard from John Robb on twitter that author Daniel Suarez, creator of the Daemon sci-fi series that he has a new book coming out.

In Daemon,  a renegade Ai program, “the Daemon” orchestrates and serves a darknet of human agents partly through the medium of augmented reality technology. Glasses were the most typical augmented reality interface with the darknet in the novel and they were just slightly ahead of their time.

Lumus is marketing a similar consumer device, which appears to be reaching the early adapter level with the movement towards stylish, sunglasses, design (as opposed to walking around with giant goggles attached by a plethora of wires to a spaghetti collander-like helmet). The crossover from uber-nerdom to cool kidz demographic is a key milestone.

A short and cranky diatribe.

Adam Elkus and his amigo Dan Trombly of Slouching Towards Colombia have been busy  poking holes into the ill-considered and/or poorly reasoned strategic conceptions of victory-free but credible influence. Dan gets very close to something important, something worth contemplating for the welfare of our Republic:

…..Rather than a world where normal victory and political decision through force of arms give way to a world of credible influence, I see this concept ushering in a world where America’s objectives remain expansive – seeking to create social and political change – but where “twentieth century” warfare continues as usual, obscured by multilateral efforts and prosecuted as much as possible by local forces. Because the objectives are essentially unchanged – overthrow of criminal regimes, integration of societies into a dynamic liberal international order, protection of civilians – one of my real fears about the Defense Strategic Guidance is that, confronted with conflicts and challenges to our interests, and with a paradigm of military aims just as expansive as before, we will slouch inevitably towards unsustainable ways of war. Already, the new objectives of civilian protection are blurring into the old objectives of democracy promotion and liberalization – just look at the title of the new State Department Office of Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

When a statesman selects Ends that have no rational relationship to available Ways and Means we might take that as a sign of possible incompetence as a strategist.

While that’s not good it is at least normal – most politicians in a democratic society are on average, poor strategists but pretty good intuitive tacticians. After all, acquiring and keeping political power for long periods of time requires more than luck and a large checkbook. While there are always some buffoons decorating the halls of Congress, as individuals, Members of Congress are usually pretty shrewd and a minority are exceptional people.

If the Ends selected are fantastically broad open-ended, undefined or, worse, undefinable, convoluted and insensible in their context, we are left with two even less savory conclusions:

First, that the statesman has a fundamental political immaturity and narcissism the leads them to articulate their emotively generated whims as policy objectives without regard to empirical reality. Sort of a wishcraft of state that substitutes rhetorical expressions and sloganeering for thought and analysis. We see this effect on a much larger scale in the ideological atmosphere of totalitarian regimes where 2+2= 5 and only Right-deviationist mathematician, counterrevolutionary wreckers would dare suggest the answer is 4. Geopolitical goals that are created by political fantasists – like the creation of a modern, liberal democratic state in Afghanistan in a few years time – can be appended with “And a Pony!” and still be just as likely to come to pass.

American statesmen seem to be particularly predisposed to this condition in foreign affairs (and arguably, in fiscal affairs as well). Perhaps this is an intellectual legacy of Wilsonian excess but the problem was not acute until the past decade and a half, which indicates that the driving force may be, in part, generational. Men and women born into a time of record-breaking standards of living have reached the apex of power and they are no more inclined to act with restraint, responsibility or realism now than they did in ’68.

The second conclusion is that the Ends are purposefully incoherent and recklessly broad because the real strategic objective is not in our relations with country X, but for the statesman to wrest for their faction as large a grant of unaccountable power as possible.

Adam Elkus –There Is No Substitute For Victory & There Is No Substitute, Part 2.

Mixed results in Iraq and Afghanistan are not proof that victory itself should not be a goal of American military efforts. They are only proof that the policies and strategies that animated American forces were faulty. If Slaughter and Bacevich are arguing that we should adopt more realistic and limited policies and strategies in war, I wholeheartedly agree. Nearly a decade of state-building later, we have ultimately little to show for our efforts. But that is not what is what is being said. Rather, there is a straightforward argument that we cannot “win” wars anymore….

Adam wages battle against unclear and poorly reasoned thinking in national security affairs.

Fabius Maximus – About the escalating conflict with Iran (not *yet* open war),  Have Iran’s leaders vowed to destroy Israel? , What do we know about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? and What does the IAEA know about Iran’s nuclear program?

FM is running a series on the political lobbying for war with Iran, or at least US sanction for an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities and research sites.

Summary:  What do we know about Iran’s program to build atomic weapons?  For decades Americans have been subjected to saturation bombing by misinformation and outright lies about Iran.  The information from our intelligence agencies has painted a more accurate picture, if we choose to see it.  Sixth in a series; at the end are links to the other chapters.

Steven Pressfield-Work Over Your Head 

Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are…..

KC Johnson – Groupthink & Political Analysis

A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and less pedagogical diversity. Outside the academy, the prevalence of groupthink has had the unintended consequence of making the views of “mainstream” academics of little use even for their seeming political allies.

Hat tip to Bruce Kesler.

Slouching Toward Columbia –Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties

Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.

This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.

The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at acertain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both)…..

The subtext to some of the anti-drone angst is that it is an effective use of American power against some of the worst bastards on Earth, hence the hurry to tangle up in investigations, regulations and lawfare, something that is morally indistinguishable from an artillery shell or infantryman’s bullet.

Ribbonfarm –Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

 The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment.  Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:

• As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
• Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
• The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
• Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
• The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology 

An old post by Venkat I stumbled across.

Gary Rubinstein–The ‘three great teacher’ study — finally laid to rest 

Rubinstein deconstructs a study that undergirds a central tenet of corporate Ed Reform:

….When you look at this graph, the first thing that might seem unusual is that the high group is not the 555 group, but the 455 group.  Why is that?  Well, because the 555 group had a different starting point than the 111 group, so it would not be a valid comparison.  None of the twenty graphs have both the 111 and the 555 groups since those groups never had a close enough starting point.  They explain in the paper that this is because:

So they admit that the assignment to these teachers was done with bias which, it seems to me, invalidates the entire study.  But I learned that even with this bias, the authors of the report had to further distort their results.  When you see those three bars it seems that those were the only three groups that began with a starting score of around 56%.

Metamodern – Moscow Report (II): Russians embrace a radical vision of nanotechnology 

Shlok Vaidya-FICTION: PLACEIQ 

Kings of War-Persian Risk: Analyzing “The Problem of Iran”

Trying to catch up from the point when work swamped me last week.

My longtime amigo Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye voiced a disagreement with my post Ruminating on Strategic Thinking II. : Social Conditions which he set forth there, as well as in the comments section. Here’s Dave:

Knowing How or Needing the Chance? 

My blog friend Mark Safranski’s recent musings on the nature and sources of strategic thinking brought to mind an old politically incorrect joke whose punchline is “Know how; need chance.” He opens the post with a substantial list of strategic thinkers and then tries to find commonalities among them. I found his list of commonalities uncompelling. I don’t think these commonalities illuminate what strategic thinking is comprised of but rather what circumstances provide the greatest opportunity for strategic thinking.

For all we know the greatest strategic thinker of all time is sticking components onto a circuit board in Chengdu. We’ll never have the opportunity to see the results of her strategic thinking because she’s just struggling to make money to send to her parents back on the farm.

What “strategic thinking is composed of” – that is to say, the cognitive level behaviors – I speculated upon in part I – Ruminating on Strategic Thinking. I do not expect that I was successful in being comprehensive there, but I think that post is much closer to what Dave was alluding to above.

Part II was subtitled “Social Conditions”, which dealt with an informal case study of men “who had the chance”, the US leadership of WWII and the Cold War. Dave is correct that the human population of Earth or of a nation is statistically likely to yield a talent pool more able at strategic thinking than a subset of a  narrow elite groomed or self-selected for that purpose. However, the hypothetical potential of humanity at large does not provide me with case studies to examine they way that historical elites do, strategy often being intertwined with the holding and exercise of political power.

Part III, assuming I can get to it in a reasonable time frame, will look at activities that build an individual’s capacity for strategic thought

Buried at work this week, but I wanted to take a moment to point to a review  by amigo Adam Elkus at Japan Security Watch of The Sovereignty Solution by Anna Simons:

Sovereignty and National Defense 

….their new book The Sovereignty Solution, Naval Postgraduate Institute (NPS) scholar Anna Simons and her co-authors develop an approach to global security rooted around an odd idea: every state should have the right to order itself internally under its own preferences and in turn bares responsibility for all acts of aggression that transgress the sovereignty of others. This implies tolerance for a range of governmental types, an end to expeditionary state-building (direct and indirect), and an approach to warfare built on breaking states that misbehave with conventional capabilities rather than a “whole of government” approach. While a national defense policy built around such ideas may or may not be sensible, it certainly is at variance with many cherished ideas in American and Western national security policy. To name a few, the strong and weak versions of the Responsibility to Protect and the commonly held philosophy that all foreign events are interconnected and thus of American concern.

Simons’ book, to a large extent, unintentionally describes the way that many non-Anglo Pacific governments view sovereignty and its relationship to national defense. As Amitai Etzioni noted, there is a kind of “back to the future” quality about China’s prioritization of sovereignty above all else. As the West moves away from the idea of sovereignty towards a post-Westphalian future, China has moved from a Maoist policy of sponsoring insurgencies in neighboring states to championing the idea that states should be the only legitimate force of national power within their own borders. China’s views, however, are representative of a common national security philosophy in Asia….

Hat tip to SWJ Blog