I don't trust the Coming Anarchy for the most part because they revel a bit too much in that Fourth Generation Warfare-way, and because they seem too accepting of Robert Kaplan's view of things (hence the name, one imagines).

[Kaplan's Imperial Grunts, BTW, is not having the impact he hoped for inside the Special Ops community, according to many I speak with. They are realizing that his romanticism of their work is actually a bigger threat than the critics because it creates dangerous expectations that will never be fulfilled.]

But Coming Anarchy does get around and you have to respect that. Plus it's a place of vigorous debate within their view of the world, which I find accessible for the most part--just taken too far to extremes for my regular taste. In short, a little of these guys goes a long way, but perhaps that's just the contrarian in me.

This post CISS Event: Beyond the Three Block War is an interesting you-are-there capture of a defense conference up in Canada (where I have attended some of the more interesting such conferences in my career--like in a reverse universe or something!).

Here's some snippets from the blogger Younghusband:

Yesterday I attended a conference which outlined US, UK and Canadian perpectives on Three Block War. The Three Block War (3BW) concept was first articulated by retired Commandant of the Marine Corp, General Charles Krulak in a speech in 1997, and a famous article in 1999 entitled The Strategic Corporal ...

The event was organized by the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies and was held at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. Speakers included the Director General of Strategic Planning for the Canadian Forces MGen Andrew LESLIE, Marine 3 Corp commander LGen Thomas Metz as well as other interesting speakers from the US and UK militaries, Foreign Affairs and the rest of the CF services ...

Two of the dominating themes of the conference were joint operations between services, and the Military-Civilian disconnect ...

I also noted how the US officers’ presentations had a Barnettian flavour to them. But what surprised me the most was the Canadian Captain Paul Maddison, Director General for Maritime Force Development who quoted Barnett three times and used Core-Gap terminology throughout his presentation ...

As I have said here before, Canadians are just like Americans--but better. Intellectually, they're canaries in the coal mine or frogs in an endangered environment: if they don't get it, it will never be gotten. So naturally, the spread of the vision there is quite satisfying to me.

For another interesting post on how to apply PNM to domestic situations, see Chirol's Domestic PNM Theory.

My thanks to Zenpundit for alerting me to these posts.