Storms reveal the military-market nexus

■"Bush: Increase military's relief role: President says Congress should consider letting generals lead during natural disaster," by Jim Vandehel and Josh White, Washington Post, 26 September 2005, syndicated in Indianapolis Star.

■"Iraqis wonder what price they'll pay in Katrina's wake: Their big worry: U.S. will shift resources to rebuild at home," by Steven Komaow, USA Today, 23-25 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Why the World Is One Storm Away From Energy Crisis: With Demand at Record Level, Disturbances Take Toll; Refining Capacity Stalls," by Chip Cummins, Bhushan Bahree and Jeffrey Ball, , 24 September 2005, p. A1.

Bush speaks openly of giving the military a more lead role in domestic SysAdmin-style operations (our post-conflict situations being either post-disaster or post-terrorism), which is obviously a given after the poor response to Katrina, and yet, it signals an ever increasingly embrace of such non-combat operations by our military in general, and if they can do it at home, they can do it abroad. The same bias against such work is what led us all down the garden path in Iraq (i.e., it wasn't just the Neocons or the poor planning, it was the entire institutional bias against preparing for this kind of stuff). If Katrina pushes all a bit further down the pathway of admitting the profound military-market nexus so that we stop pretending that "war is war" and "peace is peace" and never the twain shall meet in military capabilities, then so much the better.

People are wrong to say, "We shouldn't be in Iraq trying to nation-build there if we can't do a decent job of disaster relief here at home." What they should be saying is, "This is yet another example of how we have to get good at this sort of thing-whether it's home (New Orleans) or abroad (Baghdad). There should be no robbing of Peter (Iraq effort) to pay Paul (domestic disaster relief), but more a realization that we have long underfunded the SysAdmin force while overbudgeting the Leviathan force, and that bias no longer makes sense.

Today, the military-market nexus is all about business continuity, whether we're talking local disasters, terrorist strikes or threats to the global economy. It's all about keeping business up and running. The warrior culture protects the merchant culture and the merchant culture funds the warrior culture, and the only standard that matters increasingly in our interconnected world is, "Can you keep the net up and running?" Whatever that net is.

The WSJ piece on global energy markets says it doesn't take a war in the Middle East anymore to disrupt global energy supplies, which are far more just-in-time in their networks than most people realize. Just about any decent System Perturbation can disrupt global energy markets, and that means a disruption of globalization itself.

Globalization needs more than just a bodyguard against bad actors bent on "direct action." It needs a system of System Administrators, and the military's got a big role to play in all this. Baghdad showed this. New Orleans showed this. Many other events in coming years will show this.

This ain't your daddy's military.

Then again, it ain't your daddy's global economy either.

In the end, it is all about what the military has long called robustness and that which the info tech industry tends to call resiliency. It's no longer the size of the dog in the fight, but increasingly the size of the fight in the dog. In the industrial age, we built bigger dogs. In the globalized, IT-driven world of today, it's how much fight we can cram into that dog, regardless of size.

We tend, far too often, to try and scare people and institutions into resiliency, and I want to make sure Enterra Solutions avoids that. The CEO-perp-walk is certainly a wonderfully frightening imaged (easily exploited, mind you), but the better sales centers on the promise: When the going gets tough, the system gets perturbed, and everyone else is falling apart, you'll still be standing. You'll have your shit together when everyone else is bailing. You won't just have contingencies, you'll have options. The resilient individual, company, country is always making money off disasters/tumults/shake-outs/etc. The whole crisis/opportunity yin-and-yang is just naturally assumed. These people welcome what most people fear.

That's what real resiliency is: being masters of disasters. Every big growth period I've ever experienced has begun with disaster, and almost every period of lost opportunities has begun with success. This is why I stopped fearing failure a long time ago.

It's also what I admire about the military, and entrepreneurs in general, and capitalism in general: the best times to spend with such characters is when things are going worst, because that's when they're most creative.

I know I'm rambling here, but hey! It's a blog. I only have it to experiment.

I just find myself reaching for new and better descriptions of what I call that military-market nexus--trying to discover the great similarities I feel exist between these two worlds, and the whole Enterra resiliency thing is pushing me nicely along those lines. It's all about continuity--no matter what the level. It's all connected, between individuals, companies, states, the global economy as a whole. Resiliency is what wins. It's what keeps us strong. It's how we prevail in whatever war or competition you want to name . . .

So I keep reaching for words in the blog . . .

And yes, when I do that stream of consciousness sort of thing and use the word "Enterra" as part of that stream, it does unnerve people there now and then (you do notice--my lawyers trust--the disclaimer on the top of this blog . . . ). Enterra's an amazing little company led by an amazing big guy named Steve DeAngelis (who does an amazing job of selling the promise and not just the fear--as hard as that is). What it's trying to do is quite noble (build this cross-cutting notion of enterprise resiliency that unites a host of stovepiped mindsets/fields). Enterra really does want to change the world. Everybody there could make plenty of money doing something else, but they want to do this. (Same holds for me: if I just wanted to make money, I'd become a total slut in my writing and pen something like "100 Right-Wingers That Are Ruining America (And Antonin Scalia doesn't even make the top 50!)" and I'd make a shitload of money and it wouldn't change the weird, embittered person I'd become one whit (and yet so many people would think I had accomplished so much more in my fame!)!)

And yet they're a working company, and working companies have to play by certain rules, just like me being a writer. You want an audience, well then, you better be successful, because that's what gets you audiences. For companies, it's called clients.

So Enterra struggles a bit on the inside between wanting to be the company that just does well (wins clients, which usually requires very careful management of words, message, image) and wanting to change the world in a big, big way (change minds as well, where--quite frankly--you have to be more reckless if you want to break on through to the other side!). And I admire this struggle (e.g., Enterra consistently asks for small, opening jobs just to prove their vision rather than trying to rope in clients with huge, buy-everything-up-front deals), because I respect the ambition Ö and the sense of obligation to leave the world a better place . . .

God! This is why I love writing posts so much! You start out with a few articles and who knows where it takes you when you're done (which is my Freudian-slip sort of explanation for why Enterra references keep creeping into my posts: obviously, I'm still working out what I want this relationship to be for both myself as a part-time employee and the vision I nurture full-time (I know no other way to behave because--even more frankly--I don't have to behave and I can still make all the money I care to make just being my iconoclastic, megalomaniacal me!).

And yes, I will get a talking to tomorrow, and I guarantee you, it will be okay . . . because I will be okay with . . . whatever . . .