Got the first full edit back from Warren on the Esquire piece

He did a masterful job. I see my reporting and writing everywhere, but somehow it's transformed by his editing from a guy trying to sound like a reporter to one who actually does.

Mark really is amazingly good at what he does.

One problem: big piece is missing from original text, so we're talking about how to re-insert. Question of size. Sits at just over 6,200 now and we're talking a big graphic element, so this is an issue way beyond my pay-grade.

Feel so much better now that I see it. I was sweating this one a lot. Very hard to do justice to all the reporting, much less the topic, but I think we're getting what needs to be gotten: the essence of the dynamics, rendered in narrative.

It's weird, but with each reported story (already I consider the next one now that the scary part of the labor is over and the baby's out and breathing) I get so much better at the gathering and anguish so much more over the writing.

I imagine this is a standard evolution.

Break India from Iran? Good luck

ARTICLE: "Lawmakers Decry Iran-India Alliance: Leaders Warn of Damage to Nuclear Deal," By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, May 3, 2007; Page A15

Trying to break India from Iran will work about as well as trying to break China from Iran.

We look at this so myopically. Ask yourself what it would take for the U.S. to ditch the House of Saud? Well, India and China view Iran's rising role in their energy security in similar ways: a very useful hedge against uncertainty. Our behavior toward Iran and the Middle East in general cannot help but give both New Delhi and Beijing serious pause, so expecting them to abandon their best hedge is really naive, in my opinion.

Al Qaeda isn't our biggest problem in Iraq

ARTICLE: "At Lonely Iraq Outpost, GIs Stay As Hope Fades U.S. Soldiers Persevere Despite Snipers, Ambush," By Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2007, Pg. 1

ARTICLE: "Sunni Muslim Sheikhs Join US In Fighting Al Qaeda: Iraqi tribal support is linked to drop in violence in Anbar Province," By Sam Dagher, Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2007, Pg. 1

You know how much I admire Greg's ability to capture ground truth, so this is some depressing news out of Iraq.

You know, there are various ways to speed the inevitable killing in Iraq. Some work better with our presence, others without. As we remain unable to muster the sufficient number of troops through allies (we don't do diplomacy, remember?), I think it's time to try the latter route so as to incentivize the Saudis and Iranians and Syrians to more malleable positions.

And yeah, I barely distingush between the three.

I don't think forcing the function of sectarian violence precludes efforts against al Qaeda, and even if it does, al Qaeda would quickly get lost in the noise, so I take less solace than most about success in enlisting Sunni help against al Qaeda. I don't think that "enemy" constitutes our biggest problem in Iraq right now.

My, that was fast

ARTICLE: FDA appoints Acheson food-safety czar, By Gregory Lopes, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, May 2, 2007

Naturally, we get the "czar" as our public-face answer. That's mostly for show.

The real answers come in the new rules imposed internationally (regimes), nationally (regulations), by industry (standards), and within companies themselves (new performance metrics)--that and the monitoring and detection systems that accompany them.

Making all those rules work together?

That's what Enterra Solutions does.

We're a business that sees opportunities in System Perturbations--thus my obvious intellectual and career attraction to the company.

Thanks to Chad Laux for sending this.

Screw-ups generate rules more than terrorists

ARTICLE: Millions Of Chickens Fed Tainted Pet Food: Risk to Consumers Minimal, FDA Says, By Rick Weiss, Washington Post, May 2, 2007; Page A01

This whole pet food crisis is proving to be quite the interesting System Perturbation--and not necessarily in a minor key.

Pet food industry gets pinged.
China gets pinged.
Poultry industry gets pinged.

Who's next?

New rules clearly in the making. Know your biological/supply chain clearly in the offing.

And the bar just gets raised higher.

Obvious observation?

It's the screw-ups that generate the new rules far more often than the terrorists.

A bogus argument you often hear: we have to be right all the time, but the terrorist only needs to be right once.

Truth is, we need to be right all the time because, if we're not, too much crap like this crisis results. By and large, the terrorists are lost in the noise.

Pin-the-tail-on-the-dragon

ARTICLE: CO2 row threatens climate report, By Roger Harrabin, BBC News, 2 May 2007

An old story: the latest to the party resent being told by the first that they can't drink as much. No, they can't be allowed to indulge as much as their predecessors.

You want that differential? You better be prepared to pay for it, as Summers points out.

This story also points out how China's being equated now with more and more of globalization's bad and not just its good.

You rise too much and you get on everybody's radar, and your great coming-out party starts to feel like one nasty pin-the-tail-on-the-dragon game.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

Don't extrapolate the entire 21st century from Bush

ARTICLE: U.S. diplomats returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY, May 1, 2007

ARTICLE: Key US Army ranks begin to thin, By Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2007

ARTICLE: U.S.-Iran Talks Unlikely at Conference, By Robin Wright, Washington Post, May 2, 2007; Page A11

OP-ED: "The Hail Mary Pass," By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, May 2, 2007

The first piece shows the SysAdmin stuff, when pursued in the toughest spots (and here, under the toughest circumstances--thanks to Bush), is hard on all involved.

But remember this: It can be done well. It was done well in the former Yugoslavia (when Clinton got around to it), and it's done routinely well in resilient Florida (Remember the summer of 3 successive hurricanes a bit back? I do, because I traveled there repeatedly during that time frame and Florida did just fine). So reducing our current universe to Iraq and Katrina is bogus.

It's an oldie but a goodie: success is a poor teacher, while failure is a great one. Having said that, we need to recognize the wins as well as the losses, and stop pretending the latter defines our ceilings, when it simply marks the floor.

Those situations (as Friedman points out today WRT Iraq) are pure Bush-Cheney-isms, not particularly reflective of America.

This fish, as the old Russian proverb says, begins rotting at the head.

And that's why this upcoming Iraq summit is unlikely to yield much: these guys never admit mistakes (Friedman's dream), meaning one of our biggest difficulties with Iran is how similar our leaderships' styles truly are.

Meanwhile, Yingling's complaints seem born out by Army stats, suggesting the toll of this administration will be great indeed.

But don't extrapolate the entire 21st century from Bush. Too many self-professed strategic thinkers are doing that and it's quite silly.

Life will go on without Bush, and it will move along just fine--much better, in fact.

Great blog by Steve...

POST: Globalizations' Win-Win Game

Great blog by Steve on a very misunderstood topic.

No surprise on last week's column

I don't think any paper picked it up, and here's why: Scripps' processing of the text screwed up the first para, which is what I think most editors read to see if they're interested in using it. So when they see that screw-up, they back off and the column is effectively orphanned.

Sean and I are trying to get some answers through Knoxville on how Scripps's processing (which I fear is too automated) is misinterpreting some of the coding in the texts I submit. Not sure we can get to the bottom of this (I have never interacted with anyone from Scripps, just Knoxville News), but we're going to try and do our best to avoid the problem in the future, cause it drives me nuts.

You make the effort, and then this happens, and there's no way you personally can fix it.

Slow as syrup ....

Allergies killing me, but a nice surprise with spring: only one big tree in the yard looks like a goner. When you carve out a space in the woods, you worry about significant losses of trees, and of the 75 or so in the yard, looks like only one big and one small have passed in this first post-construction year. To me, I see both resiliency and something I don't have to pay for!

This week is lost to working the Esquire piece with Mark, so I'm letting a lot pass on blogging. So much to do on this piece and we're so late.

Neat news from last night though: Esquire won a National Magazine Award for national reporting (C.J. Chivers' amazing piece on Beslan, which won him a Michael Kelly award too). Esquire was nominated for general excellence but did not win this year. Apparently I didn't write enough last year.

Ahem!

Remember the Pinkertons - why and when

POST: Wal-Mart Recruits Intelligence Officers

Interesting trend that speaks to the spread of security from below--i.e., sub-nationally. This is a great point John Robb makes in his book (which, on scanning so far, seems very good to me), but it's less the dystopian outcome than just a recognizable back-to-the-future outcome. Remember why and when Pinkerton thrived in post-Civil War America.

We extend globalization so rapidly that frontiers are everywhere--as are new forms of frontiersmen (like South and East Asian "coolies" in vast numbers).

Relax Mr. Turner, the frontier's open for business again (which speaks to my "more states" scenario), and so Mr. Prince's future is quite bright (as is Cofer Black's, as he comes closest to Pinkerton's career morph from spymaster to spy privateer in Blackwater's newest product offering).

As insecurity spreads across all of Waltz's three levels (system, state, individual), so do the resilient responses. Hardly the "end" of anything (John does not sell his sub-title, proving Fallows' foreword about "optimism"--surprising to some but not to me, because I think Fallows sees a lot of Boyd in Robb [a neat lineage link having Fallows write the foreword], and intellectual pioneers are anything but pessimistic, despite their destructive tones regarding outdated paradigms--indeed, they are happy warriors, by and large), but the beginning of something far better.

Robb's book is already performing its function for me: helping to expand the vocabulary and vision, and this is good. I'll read it full next week (John's recommendation on a private-security sector book stands in the way) and I anticipate using it a lot for Vol. III, because it seems like such a strong exploration of the system-individual linkages, so a major accomplishment on John's part.

Collectively, understanding advances and any ingenuity "gaps" (a la Homer-Dixon) prove completely illusory. There are reasons why humans rule this planet, as we weren't just born yesterday.

Now, we have all levels and all sources working security, leaving behind the Cold War's abnormality (truly a suspension of history).

That's why al Qaeda never had a chance, just a forcing function we would have had to create on our own if it had not appeared.

Historical determinism's a bitch, isn't it?!

Thanks to Craig Nordin for sending this.

Book numbers

Got my royalty statements from Putnam, dated up to last July.

I've sold roughly 90,000 copies of PNM (55k hard and 35k soft). That means I'm close to 80 percent of the way to paying off my advance (called "earning out").

As for BFA, it sold 20,000 copies in its first nine months, which is roughly half of what PNM did in the same time frame. I'm only about 25 percent of the way toward earning out on that book, and it may take quite a long time there, depending on what we see with the paperback. The key will be whether or not BFA eventually picks up the regular school sales like PNM has apparently started doing.

The glass-half-empty thing is to note how long it takes to get beyond your advances.

The glass-half-full thing is to note I've sold about 110,000 books and all four versions seem to be hanging in there reasonably well on Amazon.

Of course, all of this is relative. My first book, a classic academic adaptation of my dissertation, has sold about 500 copies worldwide in the last decade and a half.

I have little idea about sales to date in Japan and Turkey. All I ever heard about Japan was that I sold about 9,000 units in the first six months there. That number could have been sales to stores but not completed sales to readers. Store typically return about 40% of the books they get from publishers back to the same publishers. Still, even if that were the case, I gotta admit I was stunned to even have a book published in another language, much less sell thousands of them.

Why bring all this up?

Well, simple answer is that I got the statement in the mail.

Trickier one is my recognizing that Vol. III needs to be a bigger seller than BFA. Otherwise I fall from the ranks at Putnam, where the standards are amazing high.

Still, I think the key is writing books you feel have never been written and can only be written by you. Once you get to those points and have it in print, you just have to be satisfied--on some level--with that accomplishment and that alone.

I know I have to write Vol. III, which in many ways will be less a follow-on and more a how-to deconstruction of what I believe in serious horizontal thinking. I just feel like that's the next logical step in my evolution: making the process of thought itself a strategically reproducible concept.

I'm confident I can sell it, but I'm certain it needs to be written.

Pulling teeth on the Esquire piece

I have always known my limits as a storyteller. For the life of me, fiction writing is a complete mystery. I love reading it, but I can't write it. I just don't have that narrative capacity.

And it shows when I try to do a reporting piece for Esquire, which Mark Warren inevitably ends up editing me heavily on: basically throwing away a lot of my stuff and forcing me to narrativize more, which I do very slowly and with great, unpleasant effort.

It's basically the difference between where I naturally excel (opinion journalism, Mark calls it) and where I am only so-so (reported journalism or narrative journalism).

And yet I go so many places and see so many privileged things, that's it's hard not to try.

Still, this effort has been a complete BITCH for me, and I'll be reluctant to try again for quite some time.

I am not Robert Kaplan although I can readily see the fun in his work.

Then again, I always feel bad when I'm deep in the bowels of a piece, so certainly I'm just taking this opportunity to whine on a bit while the whining's good.

In the end, it'll be a good piece. The process just lacks the effortlessness of my opinion journalism, which is another way of saying I put in something like 10 times the hours for maybe twice as much money. I have no idea how somebody makes a career working that hard.

The son's criticism hurts

ARTICLE: A failure in generalship, By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal

The actual Yingling article online is well worth reading.

Naturally, I find all the arguments about not adapting in the post-Cold war 1990s to the "lesser includeds" to be very much on-target. Yingling's anger makes me feel glad I stuck to such an aggressive tone in PNM and BFA. I knew the military would catch up in terms of its mid-level officers. The frustration simply had to build and the political moment arrive.

No news to me. I get an earful of this from 04s and 05s after every talk, and I do over a hundred each year.

Difference with this argument is--of course--Yingling's status and career and logical dissatisfaction with all the current gray beards parading their wisdom on cable news nets when they themselves are most responsible for the lack of adaptation across the 1990s. This is a very sore spot for the Bob Scales of this world. They legitimately believe they saved the military after Vietnam (true) and that their solution still holds after Cold War's end (not true).

To say otherwise is to attack their sense of career accomplishment--their very definition of who they are.

And when you do that on-stage, you get guys in their late 50s and early 60s standing up and yelling at you (something that happens to me more and more as the overall mood gets closer and closer to Yingling's level of angry outburst).

Wonder if Scales will call Yingling "crazy" like he routinely refers to me.

I say, God bless him for writing this piece and the journal for publishing it.

And watch Scales more closely the next time he defends Future Combat System as an absolute must.

And then switch him off and listen to Andy Krepenevich instead.

It begins to hurt when the sons turn on the fathers. The civilian pukes can be laughed off for their inherent "cowardice" (i.e., lack of mil service), but how do you dismiss the Yinglings when they finally step up and make the very same arguments?

Thanks to Mike Bowen for sending this.

Fedex--all night long

After speaking at Air War College in Montgomery yesterday, my NWA commuter has mechanicals and leaves way late, meaning I miss last connection to Indy out of Memphis.

Put up in hotel that's at start of FEDEX landing strip here, so roaring jet passes right over room every 90 or so seconds--all night long.

Unreal.

Finally getting home at noon today.

Working hard on July story with Warren. The shturmovshchina has begun!

[Ed: The what?! Tom says: Storming to get a job done. Soviet slang]

Obama's foreign policy

ARTICLE: Obama the Interventionist, By Robert Kagan, Washington Post, April 29, 2007; Page B07

Great piece on Obama's foreign policy that tells me there's exactly no reason now for any centrist Democrat to prefer McCain to Obama. Ditto for Giuliani versus Obama. Ditto for Clinton versus Obama.

Personally, I don't see much difference between any of the top four now on foreign policy, with just McCain coming off as most belligerent but hardly a hawk that separates himself from the pack.

Strong speech by Obama that makes me feel a whole lot more comfortable with him. They say Samantha Powers is a big influence on him. She wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning book on genocides and our lack of response to them, and once served on his staff, I am told.

Thanks to Jamie Ruehl for sending this.

Tom's ruling Esquire.com right now

He's got the two top articles. The State of the World article we linked last week and the new The State of the World: Author's Commentary Track. It's a 6500 word, online-only update of the article which, for print's sake, saw its last edit back in February. Check it out.

Good visit at Maxwell

Beautiful big B-52 at Maxwell AFB. Stayed in Chennault room at VIP quarters--there's some old-school WWII history (the "Flying Tigers").

Addressed class of '07, Air War College. Maybe 400 or so.

Was told they just get up and leave if you go over 45-minute mark for break, or just start spontaneously clapping to cut you off.

I went 75, then we broke for 10, then I did 35 mins Q&A, to run 30 mins officially over 90-minute limit. No one left early.

Got a very nice, Class of 07 coin.

Then a completely snafu'd trip home.

Still, very nice time and well worth the trip.