■"Drop That Ledger! This Is the Compliance Officer," by Harry Hurt III, New York Times, 15 May 2005, p. BU5.

Key long-term rule set resets resulting from the twin System Perturbations known as the Tech Crash and 9/11 include Sarbanes-Oxley and the USA Patriot Act of 2002. Both require new efforts from the private sector and give rise to the new breed of corporate insider: the Chief Compliance Officer who rivals the CEO and CFO as players crucial to any corporation's long-term health and market success.

Complaints to the SEC are sky-rocketing, having increased roughly 8-fold in recent months, and businesses are confronted with a flood of software products designed to help them deal with all this regulatory complexity. Being both compliant and secure are crucial to any company being perceived as being trustworthy in today's global marketplace. This is the essence of the military-market nexus: security as a competitive economic advantage.