Going back to Houston, Houston... Houston

Picture of GHWB at Houston airport. I am just passing thru to the O.C., where I brief the Army Science Board tonight at their annual awards dinner. Brief is being taped by docu film, "Iraq Beyond the Headlines." I also sit for filmed interview with filmmaker Dan Hare once I hit ground in Newport Beach.

Then, unfortunately, the red-eye to BWI to speak at leadership conference at U.S. Naval Academy with Steve on Connectivity-in-a-Box.

Played first round of golf with son Kev last night on local beginners course (all par 3). Kev shot 91 on front nine and I shot 58. We even shot realistically for par a couple of times. Kev passed on back nine in 95 degree high humidity heat. I shot 24 on 4 holes before lightning drove us off 14th tee. Fun to play with my Dad's clubs. Kev is already asking when we can go again!

Facing quandary on possible quick Disney jaunt with kids and wife in fall school break: spend time with them or return to Pop!Tech. What to do?

Big Bang, Part Deux (or maybe Duh!)

ARTICLE: "Bush's Risky Mideast Strategy: Seek Change, Not Quick Peace; Rice Will Solicit Backing to Disarm Hezbollah; Fears of a Broader War; New Order or Chaos Ahead?" by Neil King Jr., Karby Leggett and Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 19July 2006, p. A1.

OP-ED: Iran Against the Arabs [subscription required], by Michael Rubin, Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2006, p. A12.

ANALYSIS: "Analyzing the Options, As crises expand, the United States considers a strategy--and finds a common thread," by Robin Wright, Washington Post (national weekly edition), 17-23 July 2006, p. 16.

Leggett, King and Solomon have been steadily building to this bold analysis, which I am betting is largely correct. If so, this amounts to Bush and Co. launching Big Bang II via proxy Israel, with the proximate target being Syria, and the ultimate audience for this demonstration effect being Iran.

I will say this for Bush: the man is nothing if not bold.

Why does Israel go along? It answers the mail right now, diverting attention from the fence building and re-establishing some buffers that need to be reset in the north (Lebanon) and solidified in the east (West Bank). Plus, it's the most Israel is going to be allowed to pursue by Washington in the direction of Iran right now, so why the hell not?

So Tel Aviv administers the chemotherapy to Lebanon, hoping to kill the rogue cells while not harming the post-Cedar Revolution body that has successfully expelled the invasive presence of foreign matter (Syrian army).

Bush and Co. have long referred to Hezbollah as "A team" players in international terrorism, and with good reason, so Israel does us that favor (although one wonders how this blood-letting will let what is good in Lebanon survive this onslaught).

Short term, the target in question here is Assad. Israel puts enough pain on Lebanon and Syria suffers the cut of its economic lifeline to the world. Add in the refugees fleeing (reports of near 100k so far), and you stress Syria even more. Ultimately, one supposes, you hope to flush a lot of fighters outta Lebanon and into Syria, deradicalizing the former and radicalizing the latter (or just making the subsequent direct targeting of Syria as state sponsor of terrorism all the easier).

In effect, Bush lets Israel take up the challenge of Iran's asymmetrical war against America and our strategy of Big Bang I. We're fighting proxy to proxy now, making clear, Bush hopes, to Tehran that this route of diversion or diversification will fail.

The turning of the tide here, ideologically, is expressed by Rubin, with whom I think I've been on Kudlow: the notion of creating an anti-Iranian backlash among the Arab world. Or, to put it more crudely, we get our usual Sunni friends (that's why we liked Saddam way back when) to help us contain the perceived Shiite threat led by Iran.

If all this goes fast enough, Bush's bold second Bang could bring some real promise, but as we've seen with Iraq, good outcomes typically require significant wading through a lot of bad stuff first, meaning a lot of old bad blood has to be bled before fatigue pushes the unreasonable types into something more reasonable. In the Balkans, we let that blood-letting proceed apace before we intervened. In Iraq, we intervened first and now are forced to babysit that nasty but somewhat inevitable process of sectarian violence.

There is little hope, I would argue, that Hezbollah can be driven from Lebanon, so the real danger of this strategy is that you simply bog down Israel (once again) in bloody sectarian strife in Lebanon, Syria is destabilized but not enough that Assad can't survive by simply imitating his brutal dad, and all this tumult really--in the end--gives Iran what it wants: time and blood being shed elsewhere, plus now both the Israelis and the Americans are effectively tied-down elsewhere.

Yes, even with the tie-down America and Israel can bomb the hell out of Iran, and they together may well be building that case in their minds. But they are unlikely to find any major allies will agree with that additional plotline, as evidenced by the ongoing G8 meeting.

In that unfortunate pathway, then, we may well pull the air trigger on Iran, getting us nothing militarily but simultaneously locking us into what I warned in the Esquire piece where I first broached the rapprochement/soft kill option with Iran: we've just created a Yalta-like divide in the Middle East, with the West keeping the Sunnis and the East keeping the Shiites and Osama has his renewed split of the Core and the House of Saud becomes the crucial swing vote--and potentially crucial battleground--in what comes next.

As Robert Malley (Dir of International Crisis Group's Middle East program) points out in the Wright piece: "Here you have actors [Syria, Iran] who are basically pariahs who are trying to find their way back in. They're doing it the way they know best--brinkmanship. They want to change the rules of the game."

The real problem for Syria and Iran, both of whom I really do believe want back in (despite the hype on Iran as non-status-quo power, the attraction of its Shiite revolution has proven zero historically, and we routinely underestimate the depth of the economic stress in that country, relieved now only by the oil revenue), is that they are dealing with a very revolutionary-minded American administration right now, one that gleefully seeks to rewrite rules on global security--and shows no sign of stopping.

Hero now discovered in China's "Erin Brockovich"

ARTICLE: "In Booming China, A Doctor Battles A Polluting Factory: Fouled Rivers and Lakes Spark Flood of Protests; Officials' Mixed Messages; Inspired by Erin Brockovich," by Shai Oster and Mei Fong, Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2006, p. A1.

In my conclusion to Blueprint for Action, I provide character sketches of a host of "heroes yet discovered."

One of those listed for China is a Chinese "Erin Brockovich."

Looks like he showed up right on schedule!

Great piece by Oster and Fong, both of whom are great.

Pluralism is beginning politically in China, from the bottom up, and environmentalism is the spark, as I also noted in BFA.

Nuclear arms control is dead, long live real-time transparency

COLUMN: "The New Atomic Age Requires New Nonproliferation Strategy," by Frederick Kempe, Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2006, p. A6.

ARTICLE: U.S. and Russia Will Police Potential Nuclear Terrorists: Bush and Putin to Release Details Today, by David E. Sanger, New York Times, 15 July 2006, p. A5.

Arms control has never really worked. When treaties are signed, they pretty much represent the world moving on from whatever's being banned at that moment. So you get a chem treaty at a point in history when no one's interested in using chem anymore. You get a no-atmospheric test of nukes agreement when basically no one (except the French) are still interested in that. All these agreements, both formal and tacit, happen when the collective consensus emerges.

Or you have the bilateral stuff we did with the Sovs, which was mislabeled arms control because it only moderately slowed the growth of both arsenals . . . until, both sides wanted to reduce them, and then you got an agreement on that.

Arms control operates in the real world out there like the passage of laws often do here in the States: pre-emptively emerge they do not. Instead, they arise when a general consensus is reached on something--here, the disutility of still doing or having something.

And the countries not part of that consensus? They simply opt out.

Let me tell you what's really worked to stop the spread of nukes: the U.S. says, "Accept our security guarantee on nukes and our economic activity or... go it alone on nukes." As the Kempe piece argues, that basic transaction has talked a lot of countries out of pursuing nukes in the last 25 years. Or as Ash Carter is quoted: "We told them it's either the bomb or us, pick who you want to protect you."

Now, that works for states we're willing to defend. But what about states that aren't part of any alliances or security schemes that we promote--the isolated ones? For them, the choice offered is, "Be scared of a U.S. invasion without nukes or push for one if you reach for nukes."

And guess what? That offer doesn't work so well.

So the danger of proliferation is more existential than realized: either it's already in the cards or it ain't, because either a state is already a friend of the U.S. and our sheer existence as the world's sole military superpower does it for them, security-wise, or it doesn't. If it does, then no need for nukes. If it doesn't, then they'll be looking for nukes--by definition.

Tell me where arms control gets in between any of that logic. Tell me where the great treaty makes any of that happen or not happen--that which would happen anyway.

So we now have all the usual suggestions for even "tighter regimes" of control and embargo and whatnot to stop proliferation, even as the world is clearly headed to a major plus-up of nuclear power usage that will make most of these schemes highly unlikely to be effective.

Why do we keep coming up with these firewall schemes in a connected world? Just habit, I guess.

One of the things Steve DeAngelis and I push in our Enterra work is that we now have it within our means to move beyond that mindset and embrace the notion that you want to be in the business of tracking things real-time more than trying (often futilely) to stop their movement whatsoever. The computing power is there, and so are the sensors, with the key missing link being our forte: the automation of rule sets that allows rapid-fire sense, think and respond capacities.

So the argument here is, it's not the treaties that will keep us resilient but the technology and our willingness to embed that technology throughout our environment, something the average American is most willing to do. If we make that connectivity and transparency our essential offering, then we're doing far more than just offering to come to somebody's rescue. Instead, we're opening our nets to their participation. By adding them we expand our networks of transparency, and by joining us they gain access to those networks of transparency. Som

A sense of the wider conflict emerges

ANALYSIS: Options for U.S. Limited As Mideast Crises Spread, by Robin Wright, Washington Post, 13 July 2006, p. A19.

ANALYSIS: U.S., Needing Options, Finds Its Hands Tied, by Helene Cooper, New York Times, 15 July 2006, p. A1.

EDITORIAL: Iran's First Strike, Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2006, p. A14.

ARTICLE: Syrian President May Hold Key To Mideast Crisis: As Diplomatic Steps Begin, Assad's Choices Could Fan Or Defuse Regional Violence, by Karby Leggett, Mariam Fam, and Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2006.

There is a growing consensus that begins to see this mini-war as having little to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict and mostly to do with the settling out of the U.S.-rogue regime relationships in the region. In other words, this is still all about the Big Bang.

Many have called that strategy "failed," and yet look how it still plays out. Iran and Syria, both openly named as potential "who's next?" candidates, are clearly pre-emptively striking out. Some will naturally see this as Iran's answer to the offer made by the Bush Administration recently--thus the logic of direct action against Iran looms larger.

Me? I just see the logic of the Big Bang giving us what we always wanted: decision points for the region's dictators. The choice right now is to force some larger security engagement (the settling of issues that Iran has signalled it is interested in pursuing, but not in any venue that discusses ONLY their pursuit of nukes--go figure!) or to take action pre-emptively to rule out American-led invasions.

Our tie-down in Iraq is real, and everyone in the region knows it, so if we're not willing to engage the larger regional security agenda (and that's the signal we send with this myopic focus on WMD that's perverted our foreign and security policies almost like abortion has perverted our foreign aid agenda), then we give off the vibe that our diplomacy is fake, largely designed to buy time and consensus for ultimate military action. And guess what? The pigeons in question aren't going to wait around for that plan to unfold on Bush's watch, so their socialize their problem quite effectively through Hamas and Hezbollah.

As the NYT article pointed, it gets tough to seek diplomatic solutions when your basic foreign policy strategy is that we don't talk directly to rogues, we just threaten them and let others speak on our behalf.

Right now our approach comes off as rather bassawkwards: we decide who's bad and we threaten them directly, then we sort of backtrack to having our key allies (basically the G-8 crowd plus China) try and work the diplomacy. But we're leading with the military threat as the big prod both to our enemies and our allies, and that puts both in the position of being reactive, so the dialogue stays rather stale when our focus is so heavy on just this notion of WMD prevention.

Russia and China, no surprise, are acting like they won't let us track this war back to Iran. That leaves Assad as the weak link, so our focus will likely turn there. But if it does, Iran's already won what it really wanted: to move this discussion off their WMD pursuit, pushing the conversation back in the direction of Israel.

When I wrote last year in Esquire that Iran can basically veto our peace efforts in Beirut and Baghdad and Jerusalem, this is exactly what I had in mind. We go myopic, they socialize the problem, and our only option is diplomacy to achieve the same ends that we earlier vowed never to accept, or we fight, which we can't really pull off right now.

Iran remains the key, but this Administration hasn't expressed any interest in trying to unlock that particular door, so this war is what gets lobbed over the transom instead, and now Israel is running America's Middle East policy--which is exactly where Tehran wants us.

Tom: Angell or not?

Curzon of Coming Anarchy discusses Norman Angell. It caught my eye because Tom is sometimes accused of being Angell in the sense of 'optimistically predicts an end to great power war because of globalization, but tragically wrong'. Tom says the difference is that now we have nukes, which have ended great power war. So Tom says he's Angell, with NUKES! Tom says globalism plus nukes ends great power war. I think this is one of the places where he and the Coming Anarchists (and their patron saint, Robert Kaplan) are in fundamental disagreement.

I solicited Tom's input on this one, and he wrote:

I also argue that the European-derived globalization of the late 19th Century and early 20th century was both corrupt and fatally flawed, as well as being nowhere near as integrating globally as the U.S.-source-coded globalization of today. As Steve DeAngelis likes to point out, there were no Dells, Wal-Marts or IBMs running hyper-efficient global platforms of integrated/localized centers of production, sales, and R&D. There were no globally integrated enterprises back then, just colonial holding companies that moved raw materials in uncompetitive bilateral markets from the colonies to the colonial powers.

So not only was Angell painfully right back then, his logic is made unassailable today thanks to America's source-code for this era's globalization, plus nukes.

Then again, many strategists prefer living in the 19th century. Things seemed easier to understand back then. You could just argue "interests" and "power" and get away with almost no understanding of global economics because--gasp!--there were no global economics back then, just an integrating core of colonial powers in Europe that ultimately turned on one another out of foolish greed.

Tom around the web

+ Looney Dunes compares and contrasts Tom and John.

+ In referring to Tom's article on energy independence, chiasm coins a hip hop name for Tom: T-Barn. I like it. But aren't such names normally written without the dash: TBarn? ;-)

+ Phil Windley of Technometria links Tom's post on the Mumbai bombings as 'a very rational view on what terrorism really means'.

+ Tom's analysis of the current increase in Middle Eastern violence being Iranian pre-emptive war gets picked up by Defense Tech.

If I missed something, please let me know.

Writing for Esquire again...

Spent this weekend penning two rather short first drafts for Mark Warren for possible inclusion in an upcoming issue this fall. Both were essentially look-aheads on global security, and since I love writing "what comes next?" pieces, they were pretty fun.

Naturally, I wrote both too long, but they hummed in my opinion, and both will make great op-ed columns if they don't find a home there. But I think they will.

Pretty good piece by Wright in NYT on "progressive realism"

An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With.

It rolls for the first chunk, when Wright is describing the broad outlines of progressive realism as a bridge between idealism and realism, but then it gets bogged down in some old-think on turning to the UN as the ultimate answer. Wright's earlier points about faith in markets should have led him to promote the notion of more competition--thus new rules and new institutions rather than tired formulas of UN-this and arms control-that.

Still, good piece overall. I would gladly call myself a progressive realist. That label certainly beats Republican versus Democrat, or Wilsonian versus Kissingerian, or Idealist versus realist. And that's Wright's main point: the old dichotomies get you nowhere.

Tom's KnoxNews column today

What America should have learned from Balkan wars

This week I spoke at Croatia Summit 2006, an international conference exploring future security challenges for southeastern Europe. Held in the gorgeous resort city of Dubrovnik, this gathering of heads of state served as a celebratory reunion for diplomats who, a mere decade ago, strained to stamp out a series of wars in the Balkans.

The U.S.-led military interventions into Bosnia and Kosovo evoke few memories back here in the States. Remember the anti-war movement? The acrid public debates? [read on]

Iran launches a pre-emptive war...

... in the only way it can.

Behind Hamas and Hezbollah stands Iran and its proxy Syria, which is why Israel has always worried far more about Iran than Iraq.

We had a choice on Iran, and we chose to rerun the WMD dynamic, believing--as this Administration seems to--that it was simply a matter of showing that diplomacy can't work before setting in motion the kinetics sometime before the term is up.

Guess what? Iran doesn't care to wait on that timetable, and so it launches it's form of a pre-emptive war--well-timed and well-placed.

Hamas and Hezbollah know what buttons to push with Israel (snatch-and-grabs), and Israel is more than obliging, in its ceaseless quest for buffers, to play its role.

This "open war" will feature far more firepower than deaths (AP reporting 73 Lebanese and 12 Israelis so far, which is barely a decent train wreck). Israel will suffer minimally, mostly in diplomacy. Lebanon and the West Bank will suffer large amounts of infrastructure damage.

None of this will matter in Tehran, which is more than happy to exploit Hamas and Hezbollah to its purposes. Assad will do whatever seems to help most in tying the Americans up and diverting their attention from his failed regime, whose economic fortunes--as always--will rise or fall with Lebanon (get ready for a drop).

In the end, the Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians and Iranians will remain impoverished and disconnected, Israel will remain prosperous and connected, the conflicts will seem all the more intractable, and Iran will have bought itself some serious time.

Bush is no longer running the Big Bang. You have to go faster than the current if you wish to steer in this river. Because if you don't, someone else inevitably will.

Interesting how all this seems to come down just as the U.S. mistakenly believes it's finally getting somewhere on putting the Iranian issue in the UN Security Council.

Still believe the "perfect peace plan" between Israel and Palestine is what's really holding up stability in the Middle East?

Lack of strategic imagination has muted the Big Bang

Tom got this email:

You highlight successes of the big bang on occasion. The Washington Post's Dionne really nails it as a failure in today's edition: Big Bang Theory In Ruins. Is he looking only at short term issues, where you look farther down the road, or is there more to the differences you both seem to see? Hope the visit to Westfields went well yesterday. Meant to make that, but duty called at the Pentagon. Thanks!

Tom's reply:

Good and fair assessment by Dionne, one that speaks to the major tactical errors in this strategy: not doing well enough in postwar Iraq (enough said) and not being more imaginative on Iran, which would have gotten us better control remotely in Syria and Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas) WRT Israel.

Blaming the current Israel situation on Bush and the BB is a bit much though. There is the dream that the Arab-Israeli thing can get fixed directly, when Arab regimes plus Tehran have always used the Palestinians for their own trouble-making reasons at home (averting popular attention from much-needed reforms), in the region (stirring the pot) or complicating things for the Americans. So it's just naive to think you will ever "fix" this conflict short of fixing the regional security issue, and that's where the current Bush track on Iran lacks all strategic imagination.

When you pursue the BB, you lock in wins along the way, and Bush failed to do that in postwar Iraq and with an Iran we just made strategically ecstatic by removing threats both east (Taliban) and west (Saddam). Instead, Bush ignored and still ignores the soft-kill option on Iran (its nuke run should trigger our leadership with other Core powers on a comprehensive regional, CSCE-like agenda) and instead he's rerun the WMD drama (as if the screw-up on that subject never happened in Iraq!).

Shortest reply to all those post-Saddam-toppling mistakes?

Kerry should have won in 2004. We needed a dealmaker with strategic imagination. Carp all you like on Kerry's behavior since (he ain't prez but an opposition senator, so DUH!), but he would have been a huge and likely successful opportunity for smarter choices on pushing the BB to better fruition.

He and his certainly would have done no worse than what we've had with Bush and Rice and Hadley running our foreign policy.

These people are just tapped. As I've said many times before, they know how and when to say "no," they just don't know how or when to say "yes."

If I could give a short critique of their mindset (still very neocon, in my mind, just neocon tamed by the Iraq tie-down), that would be it. After that one bold stroke with Saddam, no strategic imagination.

In that sense, the Big Bang is a big over-reach for this crowd.

But yes, I still support the decision to go. The alternative of stasis still sucked.

Better the tumult over there, not here. Better the killing and terror over there, not here. And better professionals wage (and fight and die) in this war than U.S. citizens on our shores.

This fight was preordained in the Middle East by globalization's rapid expansion. Somehow, some way, the Middle East will be forced by history to rejoin the larger world. You can't have 3 billion new capitalists and all their needs and desires and pretend the Islamic Middle East will somehow continue in its queer disconnectedness or immoral civilizational apartheid and gender repression.

Osama picked the timing of this fight (9/11) and Bush picked the venues (Afghanistan and Iraq), but never entertain the delusion that we can "just make it all go away" with isolationism or pull-outs or hydrogen cars. Problems postponed are not problems solved, they're just problems passed on.

And on that note, Dionne is equally correct.

Sold some books yesterday...

Quick day trip yesterday to DC to meet with planner for next year's Davos conference. Steve DeAngelis sat in and we had a great talk.

Then Steve and I greet a U.S. News & World Report fellow doing a biz story, who came by to interview Steve for the piece.

I ducked out of that one, though, to keep a longstanding promise to finally return to the National Reconnaissance Office at the request of the director. Briefed an afternoon audience of a couple hundred in a nice, fancy, very secure auditorium.

You don't get rich briefing to government bureaucrats, but you may just change some minds. I must have had some impact, because suddenly all five versions of my two books climbed to below 70k on Amazon rankings.

As of a few minutes ago, the bargain paper PNM was under 4k, and the hard BFA sat under 7k. The regular paper PNM was at 54k and the hard PNM at 17k. And the newest one, the advance paper BFA, jumped from high-hundred-thousands to 67k. Pretty much all this was driven by the NRO talk, I am sure, which is nice to see.

And yes, I do check regularly.

Little payoff today, but hopefully big investment in tomorrow's thinking.

I was told the director was really intrigued with the whole notion of Connectivity-in-a-Box. So yes, the rebranding seems to work nicely!

Only bitch of the day: missed the direct outta Dulles, which was crammed beyond belief. Instead flew to Chicago and then home by 1am.

No fun, but always good to help out when you can. The Long War will be long, and that means multiple generations to educate...

Robb's comeback on Mumbai

Found as an update to his original: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2006/07/bombing_systems.html.

John's point on "think Israel, not Vietnam" is a good one. But I think it works better for me than him.

I'll take Israel's enduring connectivity and resilience, no matter what counter-guerrilla wars they are forced to wage.

But in the end, Israel's Old Testament choices reveal themselves to be strategically unsound, in that they do not get them what they really want: eyes for eyes makes the Middle East blind.

Our model here is not Israel, but the Brits in Northern Ireland. This is what Chiarella argues and seeks to achieve. It's is amazingly hard stuff (reducing kinetcs on all sides), requiring a discipline among troops that is profound and hard to train up.

And John, that's why the COIN won't push 4GW. The celebration of gore implied far too often in its enunciation makes it inappropriate for a Field Manual. Full-throated 4GW (is there any other kind?) is too Israeli and too Old Testament in tone. What Petraeus and Nagl and Crane and others are reaching for here is counter-4GW that recognizes, sensibly, the limits of military power. 4GW adherents want too often to militarize our responses or make our military too much of the lead. Don't assume that countering 4GW looks like 4GW. Assume we meet their asymmetry with a better version of our own asymmetry. Defeating 4GW doesn't mean you become adept at 4GW. It means you become supremely resilient, as in, anything you can do I can counter faster.

Now I am confused...

I had assumed that Sean was posting my stuff through his account, thus he was being listed at the bottom of the posts, thus the confusion of a reader who emailed me today wondering if my blog had somehow been taken over by Sean.

But as I scan the posts just now, I realize Sean always posted my blogs for me in such a way (using my account) as to make the software list me as author (thus eliminating any confusion), so frankly, right now I have no idea what this reader is talking about.

Sean does an excellent job of moving things along on the blog, and I'd welcome even more of his input that keeps materials and events up to date for readers. His role is only likely to grow, simply because there are only so many hours in the day and--for example--I just don't have the time to read everything that's connected to discussions out there (something Sean and many other readers do for me, sending me what they feel I need to know). If a few people get jazzed about seeing his posts alongside mine, then that's just gonna have to be too bad. I travel just too damn much, and I like my kids too damn much, to care.

Yes, this is still my blog!

DATELINE: Above the garage, Indy, 14 July 2006

I blog a lot through my phone now, just firing off emails to Sean Meade, my webmaster, for him to post to the blog.

Sean naturally enters the blog site through his own account, thus when he posts my stuff for me (yes, he gets paid like any job), the blog will list him as the posting agent at the bottom of the post.

Sean, I believe, has taken great pains to make it obvious when he's speaking in his own voice, but I can see how some people have gotten confused.

From now on, Sean will enter the blog through my account whenever he's posting my direct feeds so that the post authorship at the bottom does not confuse any readers.

Serving in the SysAdmin force is bad for your career

OP-ED: "Send in the Advisers: An easy way to help the Iraqi military," by Andrew F. Krepinevich, New York Times, 11 July2006, p. A19.

Great piece by Andy on how, just when we need them most ("These advisers are the steel rods around which the newly poured concrete of the Iraq military will harden."), the Army's "best officers avoid serving as advisers if at all possible. The reason is simple: the Army is far more likely to promote officers who have served with American units than those who are familiar with a foreign military."

Paging Col. Lawrence...

We need to reward "living native"--hell, even "going native" if that's what it takes to prevail in the Long War at a loss rate that is tolerable.

As Andy says, "Their success will determine whether we win this war, at what cost, and how soon."

South Korea will be "emerging" so long as its foreign and security policies vis-a-vis North Korea remain so patheticaly immature

ARTICLE: "For South Korea, 'Emerging' Label Can Be a Burden," by Ian McDonald and Karen Richardson, Wall Street Journal, 12 July 2006, p. C1.

South Korea has the 12th largest economy in the world, on par with Canada, a member of the G-8, and yet it's stll considered "emerging" by all indices.

Why?

"One obstacle to an upgrade is the risk of political instability in neighboring North Korea, as evidenced by that country's missile test firings last week."

You want serious Core status, you need to act like a serious Core power, not bury your head in the sand and expect others to carry your weight.

In the absence of fiscal discipline, the Leviathan's cries of "feed me!" are met

ARTICLE: "Late and Costly: Pentagon Still Pays; Spending More for Less is Frequent In Weapons Projects Since 9/11," by Leslie Wayne, New York Times, 11 July 2006, p. C1.

Chuck Spinney must be spinneying in his grave (actually, I have no idea if he's still around, I just couldn't resist). As I wrote in BFA, Spinney's brief in the 1980s on the spiralling costs of major programs of record explained the logic by which costs tended to run out of control over the life of any acquisition. It made him famous enough for the cover of Time.

This dynamic of spiralling costs is alive and well, as the F-22 Raptor projected in 1992 to cost $125m per copy is now weighing in at $361m per unit.

Yes, yes, Rummy promised streamlining designed to put some dents in those typical glidepaths, but 9/11 gave him as close to a blank check as one gets in this world, so with the lack of fiscal discipline from across the river (neither the White House nor Congress shows any restraint here), Rummy gets to love all his children, with no Sophie's choice in sight.

Like too many tough calls with this administration, it's being passed on to the next.

Naturally, the biggest money--and thus the bulk of the overruns--sits with new weapons systems. New ones will cost a good trillion and a half between now and just 2009, with $800 billion set to be spent in a grand flurry as this administration exits some 30 months from now.

As so many critics note, there are real needs, and then there are what the Pentagon wants, and that's where the mania on China is so damaging, setting us up to underfund the ground forces that should be seeing their budget shares grow dramatically in this Long War, but instead are being starved by the Leviathan's dreams.

I'm all for unfair fights, but this 12 Sigma approach is just too rich for our 4GW environment. It's strategically criminal waste, and letting it pass with so little effort to stem it is--in my mind--the great failure of Rumsfeld's reign. He's done plenty of good, but he hasn't dealt effectively with the bad, and that simply pushes the truly hard decisions to the next administration.

Clear sign of a System Perturbation: the "declarations of resistance"

OP-ED: "India's Indestructible Heart: Once again, Mumbai pick itself up," by Naresh Fernandes, New York Times, 12 July 2006,p. A23.

ANALYSIS: "India Is Resilient in Wake of Deadly Blasts: Inured to Terror Attacks, Citizens Resume Daily Lives and Investors Defy Fears of a Selloff," by Peter Wonacott and Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2006, p. A5.

Whenever opinion leaders feel the need to declare the "indominatable spirit," you know it felt like one helluva shock to the system.

But as the WSJ piece listed, Mumbai has had numerous significant terror attacks in the past dozen or so years.

I remember being a bit nervous about being in the company of India's PM, President and other senior cabinet members during my spring 2000 trip to Mumbai for the international fleet review I described in PNM. Just being around so many of their special ops guys, the Black Cats who dressed in ninja black from head to toe, made me a bit wary. I mean, if you need that sort of protection, who's out to kill you?

Well, as we know from India's history, plenty of people are out to kill its leaders, and since Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, I think the ultra-high security around the top leaders has forced terrorists to go after softer targets.

But like the Brits with the IRA bombings in the 1980s, Mumbai--and India in general--basically shrug off these attacks:

The key lesson, say those who have lived through attacks, is that even if markets go down and political temperatures go up, life goes on.

India's stock markets have recently experienced a good correction, so there was little puffery to expel as a result of this shock. That helped plenty:

The [market's] resilience emboldened people from juice salesmen to top government officials. "Your resilience and resolve will triumph over the evil designs of the merchants of death and destruction," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday in a nationally televised speech. "No one can come in the path of our progress. The wheels of our economy will move on."

Infosys had just reported a 50% rise in quarterly profits, and when your "GM" does that, things get a lot easier on the economic morale front.

But here is my favorite line, one that undercuts the synchronicity argument of regular attacks (as in, ping the system regularly and keep everyone in a state of freaked out alert):

"We have seen this in New York, Madrid and London. Lots of countries today are dealing with terrorist attacks," Mr. Nilekani [InfoSys CEO] said in an interview. "The people of Mumbai are especially resilient."

In short, it gets harder to shock the Core over time. Big cities come to expect their turn, and no one wants to look any less resilient than others--a point of city/national pride.

So we're not such wimps after all...