The SysAdmin goes high-tech as the environment regresses

■"A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield," by Tim Weiner, New York Times, 16 February 2005, p. A1.

■"New Factor in Iraq: Irregular Brigades Fill Security Void," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 16 February 2005, p. A1.

Experts keep wanting to attack the SysAdmin concept as ìlow tech,î when itís really ìwow techî thatís got a lot more commercial-sector crossover potential. We canít swap out people for capital much more on the Leviathan force, because itís already amazingly capital-intensive. Logically, as an investor in the defense community, you should not fear the transformation of transformation from the Leviathan to SysAdmin, because the latter is the ìGapî of the defense universe: lotsa labor just waiting to be technologized into something more efficient. Robots were never going to take off in the Leviathan world, but in the SysAdmin universe, their potential is almost unlimitedóand all of it can be used simultaneously in the private sector because policing is policing the world over, as is transparency and monitoring in general.

The SysAdmin force isnít the death of the defense industry, itís the salvation.

Especially since the environment itíll be working in only grows more complex with time. The Fourth Generation Warfare types want you to believe that Network-Centric Ops are passÈ, when in reality theyíre only beginning to come into their own, with the real progress of the future coming on the SysAdmin and not the Leviathan side. War remains incredibly simple and hellish, but peace gets more complex by the moment. In war, telling the bad from good is fairly straightforward, but telling all the good guys from all the bad guys in peace isnít just hard, itís godawfully complex. Networking the military is going to be a lot more interesting in the SysAdmin force than it ever was in the Leviathan force. The Leviathan lives in a pre-Net or Net-down environment, by and large, whereas the SysAdmin is networking personified.