The Institute for Defense & Business

Flew to Raleigh NC Sunday night and spoke for 2-plus hours this morn to mature USG bureaucratic audience (30 or so) of mid-level players in the world of postconflict stability and reconstruction ops. Each one got a signed paper PNM as part of the class. I kicked off the multiday "Executive Business Mission Area Economic Revitalization Course" sponsored by the same Business Transformation Agency in DOD that supports some of Enterra's pioneering work in the Kurdish region of Iraq.

Good-to-better-than-average brief from me. I was somewhat surprised, given how this audience and course represent such a validation, that I spent a lot of time voicing worries about an abandonment of the SysAdmin evolution in a post-Iraq political universe, but I do honestly worry about that with all this growing Hill talk of "rebalancing" (code for getting back to buying major weapons systems for the Big War scenarios). Some dread among the participants too, especially among the younger ones who sense this SysAdmin evolution is absolutely essential.

Something to guard against no matter who wins in November. There will be a strong impulse to bury the Iraq experience and get all this adaptation behind us/"let the military heal and recover" and so on.

That will only play into latent impulses to retarget on China .... An impulse reawakened with the current financial distress.

Comments

[Ted O'Connor]

Yes, we will see the Chinese dragon breathing fire again if Iraq begins to wind down. Lots of folks in the defense industry thought that there was going to be big money in homeland security. I was contacted by many hopeful vendors who wanted to sell "something" to the "first responders". But there have been no attacks on the homeland since 911. Americans now resent the inconveniences at the airports and the borders. It will be back to nuclear subs, electro-magnetic guns, and replacing the B-52 before you can say "Military Industrial Complex".