New Chet Richards' PPT brief on Grand Strategy
Saturday, March 4, 2006 at 5:12AM Find it here: http://www.d-n-i.net/richards/4GW_and_grand_strategy.pps.
It is a good summary of his new short book entitled, Neither Shall the Sword: Conflict in the Years Ahead (Washington DC: Center for Defense Information, 2005). Michael Lotus sent me the PPS link and pushed me to buy the book, which I didn't have to, because CDI sent me a copy.
I read the book this week during take-offs and landings (yes, 14 in all will do it, as the whole thing is 94 pages stem to stern), and it's a great read. Chet writes with a cleanliness next to Godliness. I will offer a review of sorts soon, maybe this weekend.
For now, check out the slides. Chet's briefs (remember I saw one in Bergen, Norway last year) are awfully good. Too bad no audio. Chet's got this Cracker Barrel voice from the 1930s that's interesting to listen to.
Reader Comments (6)
Radio reception was hit or miss back in rural Mississippi. Often all we could get was the Grand Ole Opry.
One minor point, to get the file people need to right click to save to desktop and then change the extension to .ppt (from pps). For Mac it is control/click and save file. If you don't do this, all you get is code.
Great briefing by Chet -- synthesizes the best of Boyd with many present writers. However, he drops a bomb in his conclusion with the recommendation to "privatize" our residual conventional force capability. I'd like to see what others think of that proposition.
Tom.
I totally agree on the essential views you express. The prose is spare and limpid.
One minor point, though...I've always thought of crackerbarrel people as sort of slo-o-o-w when they talk.
I've been listening to Chet talking for years, and 'slow' is not a word I associate with the torrents that normally fall from his lips. (It wasn't that way in Oslo, either, as I recollect.)
The first time i heard him, I think he ran through about 60 powerpoints in a little under an hour and a half... Hard to chew a cracker along the way at that clip, especially since the slides were text-heavy at the time.
Just for the fun of it, for those readers who haven't heard him, here are a couple of sound links you can find at Belisarius.
The first one here is Chet at normal speed.
http://www.belisarius.com/video.htm
The one here is Chet in Norway
http://www.jaddams.com/services/boyd.html
You can find it at the bottonm, and on the left, it's a lnk to a hefty quicktime file.
But yes, what a shame we aren't hearing him here.
best,
Ole
Great job!!! Super!!
Ole is right about Chet's speed of delivery. Guess I was thinking more that his voice tends to have that crackling quality one associates with the south.
It's interesting, because southern accents are often associated with being--to put it kindly--slow in general. But the one subject where that southern twang always sounds smarter than the average bear is when warfare is being discussed (with, I guess, lawyers coming in second). Think about that for a second and you'll know what I mean. It is no secret to anyone who works with the military that you come across a lot of southern voices. It's not just a stereotype. Southerners still tend to be overly represented in officer ranks--at least among the ground pounders, I find. And you often discover that it's a long family line with all the attendant assumptions that service to one's country is a very honorable thing.