Remember when I told you that a long war wasn't good for classic defense programs?

FRONT PAGE: "Premier U.S. Fighter Jet Has Major Shortcomings: F-22's Maintenance Demands Growing," by R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, 10 July 2009.

Oh, all I'd hear is how profits were so up in the industry. What was Barnett thinking in making this clearly wrongheaded prediction?

Gosh, I guess I was thinking past the current quarter.

Lock-Mart buys Pacific Architects and Engineers (the KBR of the State Department) because they had some real vision (which I talk about in Great Powers), which means they too were thinking toward a depressed Leviathan market. Other companies have followed suit. I know. I interact with them all the time, having given them speeches for years now.

Now, smart companies realize that the long-anticipated Iraq drop-off is coming, so jumping onboard the USG's new focus on "smart power" (some more smarts, very little pow-wah!--whatever the hell that is) will see them embrace a more pre-emptive form of SysAdmin work (Enterra is moving in that direction in spades [actually, for a couple of years now], in our typical thought leadership mode). But let's be even more clear about direction here: what the USG focuses on will be just the tip of a huge iceberg of activity from Core/Seam to Gap, as Indian FDI and Chinese FDI and Arab FDI comes into a lot of frontier spaces. In that vast flow, the USG will be a niche, but important player, especially in terms of credentializing certain efforts and pushing a certain focus on the creation of appropriate rules for all that growing network connectivity.

The real market opportunity isn't about chasing USG dollars. It's about getting in front of that flow and arbitraging the differential in counterparty capacity--the essence of Development-in-a-Box‚Ñ¢ (as in, fill that space).

The new model of "connect-up" will replace antiquated (and often dangerous) ideas of "catch-up" development strategies. How hard is it to do? It's easy only if you can operate--with great skill--across a large number of domains, both sectoral and process. In other words, if it were so easy, that nut would have been cracked a while ago.

But no, it won't involve much pow-wah! And that's not good for the F-22.