Time's Battleland: "A provocative vision of a post-supercarrier US Navy"

The notion of doing away with traditional big-deck carriers gets a high-profile boost this month in the latest (May) issue of Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute's official rabble-rouser. It's written by a friend and colleague, Capt. Henry (Jerry) Hendrix, along with a retired Marine Lt. Col., Noel Williams. Hendrix, a truly innovative thinker, currently works for the legendary Andy Marshall at the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment - a great match. The piece notes the rising capabilities of the Chinese navy and its efforts to keep us - and our carriers - as far from their shores as possible. 

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

A reworking of my post yesterday about the carrier piece in Proceedings, meaning this was the pilot post I worked out with Thompson at Time.  After this shakedown cruise, I'll do the post up first for Battleland and then link from here, like I do with Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Joining the contributors to Time's Battleland blog

It's the new blog run by the always impressive Mark Thompson and it's focused on security issues.  I will cross-post from here on occasion - all the better to get the word out.

I was honored to be asked to participate by Mark, whose work I've long admired.

This won't impact my output here or at Esquire's The Politics Blog, but it will give you all a nice outlet for suggested posts.  So when great stuff pops up, please keep me and this new venue in mind.

Easiest way to reach me is thomaspmbarnett@mac.com

Brilliant piece on needing to move past traditionally defined carriers

Written by USN Capt. Henry (Jerry) Hendrix, a professional friend, along with a retired Marine LCOL in this month's US Naval Institute Proceedings. See reference below for link.

Hendrix currently works for Andy Marshall at Office of Net Assessment, which is a great match.

Much to quote:

We can’t know for sure in what ways future adversaries will challenge our Fleet, but we can assess with some certainty how technology is affecting their principal capabilities. Judging from the evidence at hand, future Fleet actions will place a premium on early sensing, precision targeting, and long-range ballistic- and cruise-missile munitions. Increasingly sophisticated over-the-horizon and space-based sensors, in particular, will focus on signature control and signature deception. Thus, we must ask ourselves how best to win this battle of signatures and long-range strike.

This is a sideways reference to the rising capabilities of the Chinese navy and their efforts to keep us - and our carriers - as far from their shores as possible.

Given very clear technology trends toward precision long-range strike and increasingly sophisticated anti-access and area-denial capabilities, high-signature, limited-range combatants like the current aircraft carrier will not meet the requirements of tomorrow’s Fleet. In short, the march of technology is bringing the supercarrier era to an end, just as the new long-range strike capabilities of carrier aviation brought on the demise of the battleship era in the 1940s.

The Chinese are targeting our carriers.  We can either see the future in defending them as is, or get new carriers.  You don't just ditch what you got because it's vulnerable.  But if it's becoming vulnerable and the agents of that vulnerability suggest a new era is dawning, then you pay attention.

Factors both internal and external are hastening the carrier’s curtain call. Competitors abroad have focused their attention on the United States’ ability to go anywhere on the global maritime commons and strike targets ashore with pinpoint accuracy. That focus has resulted in the development of a series of sensors and weapons that combine range and strike profiles to deny carrier strike groups the access necessary to launch squadrons of aircraft against shore installations . . .

Accompanying this range deficiency has been the dramatic increase in the cost of the carrier and her air wing. The price tag for the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) was $950 million, or 4.5 percent of the Navy’s $21 billion budget in 1976. The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), lead ship of a new class of supercarriers, is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $12.5 billion  . . . The Gerald R. Ford is just the first of her class. She should also be the last.

I couldn't agree more.  This is Norm Augustine's nightmare come true - the military that becomes so expensive you can only afford one of everything.

The Chinese are emphasizing sea control over power projection. Given this Chinese “vote” and the challenges we continue to face in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, we must rebalance our Fleet to meet new sea-control missions while maintaining reasonable power-projection capabilities for the range of global threats we will encounter. These new challenges mean that the Fleet architecture must evolve rapidly to meet the new mission requirements of our time. We need to recognize this now and avoid a 21st-century Pearl Harbor.

The old paradigm is untenable.  Time to move on.

In such a new strategic environment, unmanned systems diminish the utility of the supercarrier, because her sea-control and power-projection missions can be performed more efficiently and effectively by other means. When the carrier superseded the battleship, the latter still retained great utility for naval surface fire support. Similarly, today’s carrier will be replaced by a network of unmanned platforms, while still retaining utility as an as-needed strike platform. Ultimately, the decision to kill the battleships was not because they lacked utility, but because they were too expensive to man and operate. Future budgetary constraints could lead to a similar outcome for the carrier, recognizing that even if we purchased no new supercarriers, we would still have operational carriers in the Fleet for more than 50 years.

So we're not exactly abandoning our current capability.

In the meantime, the America-class big-deck amphibious ship has the potential to be a new generation of light aircraft carrier. At 45,000 tons’ displacement, she will slide into the water larger than her World War II predecessors, and larger even than the modern French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Designed without an amphibious well-deck, she will put to sea with a Marine Air Combat Element and key elements of a Marine Expeditionary Unit.

However, to view this purely as an amphibious-assault ship would be to miss her potential as a strike platform. Stripped of her rotorcraft, the America class could comfortably hold two squadrons of F-35B short take-off vertical-landing (STOVL) stealth fighter/attack aircraft. Such an arrangement would allow the naval services to dramatically increase presence and strike potential throughout the maritime domain. In addition, if the requirements were instituted in the near term, the new unmanned carrier-launched airborne-surveillance and strike (UCLASS) aircraft could be designed to operate from America-class decks with greater potential utility and distribution than what could be expected when operating from super carriers.

I've liked this argument for many years now.  End the big decks and go with the "small" deck amphibs as a cheaper and more flexible package.

The new combatants would actually be “carriers,” but rather than carrying aircraft, they would carry an array of unmanned systems. A balanced Fleet would have a mix of small, medium, and large unmanned carrier combatants to cover the range of Fleet functions. One near-term option would be to truncate production of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and replace both the LCS and the Dock Landing Ship (LSD) with a common hull displacing around 10,000 tons.

Thus you start experimenting - relatively cheaply - with mother ships while running out the lengthy lifespan string of the big decks.  To me, this is THE obvious way to go.

Strong finish:

Continuing to invest in platforms such as the supercarrier—which are expensive to build, cost-prohibitive to operate, and increasingly vulnerable in anti-access/area denied environments—is to repeat the mistakes of the battleship admirals who failed to recognize air power’s potential in the 1930s.

No less authority than Pacific Commander Admiral Robert Willard has stated that China’s DF-21D antiship ballistic missile has reached initial operational capability. We must recognize the new environments in which we will be operating, as well as the profound impact unmanned systems will have on future operations, and adjust our Fleet accordingly if we are to avoid a Pearl Harbor of our own making. We must reallocate science-and-technology, research-and-development, and acquisition resources toward this new Fleet paradigm . . .

Moving away from highly expensive and vulnerable supercarriers toward smaller, light carriers would bring the additional benefit of increasing our nation’s engagement potential. This type of force structure would allow the United States to increase its forward presence, upholding its interests with a light engagement force while maintaining, at least for the next 50 years, a heavy surge force of supercarriers. Geopolitics and technology are rapidly evolving the future security environment, and we must make decisions today to adapt the Fleet away from its current course to a new design for a new era.

This is how a superpower, suffering relative economic decline, keeps up its global power projection at a reasonable cost.

Excellent piece.  Worth reading in entirety for details, if interested.

Blast from my Past: The Brief at JHUAPL (2005)

A nice archive of a "Blueprint for Action" era version of the brief, delivered in Alexandria Va as part of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's "Rethinking the Future International Security Environment" series of speakers 2005-2006.  A lot of great talks from great thinkers found on the page here.

Video of my talk found here.

Audio only here.

Download notes version.

Download copy of unanimated slides.

Latin America turning to East, but not exactly in China's pocket yet.

The FT has a curious headline on this piece, which kicks off a special section on "new trade routes" for Latin America.  It says, "China is now region's biggest partner."

A region once known for instability has sailed through the global financial crisis. Poverty is falling, the middle classes booming, and asset markets bubbling.

This is due to a spectacular expansion of commodity-based trade. Over the past decade, fast-growing emerging countries, be they in Asia, India or Africa, have shown a near insatiable demand for the commodities that Latin America has in such abundance, whether Argentine soya, Brazilian iron ore, Chilean copper or Peruvian gold.

The change has been rapid: in 1999, trade betwen Latin America and China was a mere $8bn. By 2009, according to UN figures, it had grown 16 times to $130bn. By comparison, bilateral trade with the US rose by just a half over the same period.

Less well appreciated is how intra-Latin American trade has grown over the same period. During the colonial years, neighbouring countries were more likely to trade with Europe than each other. Now, growing business and infrastructure links are bridging Latin America’s huge geographical obstacles – its vast forests and giant mountain ranges – knitting the region’s economies together.

If anything, the pace of change has increased since the global financial crisis. Developed markets remain mired in sluggish growth and high debt. Meanwhile, emerging economies are surging ahead; they now account for three-quarters of global economic growth, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).

The rising middle classes of the emerging world are behind this shift. They aspire to own the same homes and cars, and eat the same foods, as their peers in the developed world. As a result, their economies have a higher propensity to consume the commodities that Latin America produces.

Most dynamic new partner, yes, but the same piece later states that US trade with the region was $486B in 2009, or "almost four times China's total." If US trade grew by half over the last decade, then it grew in the range of about $150B, or more than China's entire amount.

Piece also says that 90% of the FDI flowing into the region's two biggest economies, Mexico and Brazil, come from OECD or Old Core economies.

Would seem that an editor got excited.

Insensitive yes, but Geronimo reference is historically apt

From the AP on Yahoo news:

WASHINGTON – The top staffer for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is objecting to the U.S. military's use of the code name "Geronimo" for Osama bin Laden during the raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.

Geronimo was an Apache leader in the 19th century who spent many years fighting the Mexican and U.S. armies until his surrender in 1886.

Loretta Tuell, staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said Tuesday it was inappropriate to link Geronimo, whom she called "one of the greatest Native American heroes," with one of the most hated enemies of the United States.

"These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating," Tuell said.

This is what I said in Esquire's The Politics Blog yesterday:

It's become a drones-without-borders world, befitting the frontier-integrating age we live in. Think of the American West after the Civil War and how we spent years hunting down all the Native American "insurgents" who popped up over the decades. Bin Laden goes down just like a Crazy Horse or Geronimo — a grubby end to a mythical warrior figure. But the larger process goes on, even as the Chinese drive most of of globalization's advance in that part of the world. But, yes, we'll keep hunting them down. That's what bureaucracies do, and that's why the lone-wolf resistance always loses in the end.

I saw comments that indicated that people were offended by my Crazy Horse reference.  The Senate staffer takes similar umbrage at the US military referencing Geronimo.

Yes, now, we cast these figures in better lights, but at the time they were considered blood-thirsty killers who preyed on Americans, which, of course, they were and did - whatever the post-dated nobility of their motives.

But my larger point, and I think the military's larger point, is the similarity of the process.  The US military hunted Geronimo for many years.  With Crazy Horse, it was a sad and grubby end to a warrior's life, getting shot while surrendering at a US government post (I've been to the historical site).

In their time, these guys were magnificent insurgents who brutally murdered in a fashion designed to incite terror.  They were fighting for their way of life - and they doomed in the same way that Bin Laden was.  The process of frontier integration was too powerful and too vast and they could not adjust.  Back then it was the westward expansion of the US - a microcosm of today's globalization expansion.

The piece too dangerous to publish

You can download the article I wrote for Esquire's Middle East edition, which isn't owned by Hearst.

It's called, "The Anti-Conspiracist’s Guide to Revolution in the Arab World."  

It was just an observation that came to me before falling asleep one night, so I quickly wrote it down in a list form and planned to use it as a column.  Then Esquire Middle East contacted me and asked me to write something big picture about events there, so I did.  We went through all the pre-production and it was set for the April issue when it was cut by the magazine at the last second out of the fear of offending local authorities. The mag is based in the UAE.

Personally, I saw nothing in the piece that was all that scary.

You can download it here.

Quote of the day: China's "new" carrier

FT story on Chinese navy trotting out used Ukrainian carrier that it is using to train its personnel for the ultimately home-built carrier it should possess near the end of the decade.  China also practiced outfitting a carrier here because it bought the hull from Ukraine in 1998 unfinished (meaning they've been at it 12 years on some level).

Carrier is named Shi Lang, for a 17th century admiral who conquered Taiwan - get it?

The quote from a non-Chinese naval officer:

Owning a carrier is one thing, operating one, or even a carrier strike group, is something completely different.

By the time China can operate a carrier strike group, the US should have left that field and moved onto something far more flexible, fungible and unmanned in execution.

Or we can hang around the 20th century while China plays catch-up.

Think I solved the PPT slideshow latency issue

If I ever sat on a psychiatrist's couch, I would definitely admit to having latency issues.  I almost cannot use sat TV in hotels because the channels change so slowly.

Anyway, I got me a VGA 15-pin male-to-male cable at Radio Shack, and thinking about my issue while driving to and fro the store, I figured out the problem.

If the animation runs fine in Slideshow on the Mac when I'm just using the Mac, then there's no reason why it should run slow when outputting to the LCD.  The machine simply doesn't care about the output, and the real conversation is between my clicker and the PPT program.

Then I realized:  in default mode, PPT in Slideshow goes to presenter's mode, which shows two versions of the brief simultaneously:  the current click and the next teed-up click. With a simply bulleted presentation, this is handy, because it gives you a cheat sheet for the next bullet at all times.  Plus you can read off your notes in this mode, effectively giving you a poor man's teleprompter (the inventor of which just died).

But I don't need any of this:  I don't stand behind a podium (it's the only way to induce fear of speaking in me); I have the entire many-hundreds of clicks memorized because my memory is overwhelmingly visual (forget your name, I can remember every click in a 1000-click briefing like a concert pianist playing a long piece by heart) , and I don't use any notes (I have the "text" pretty much memorized too as I hone it over talks; I don't actually ever write anything down and I never start with any prepared remarks, so I'm improvisational-seguing-to-canon that I can alter at will, depending on the audience).  

The real problem is the dual visual representation of the brief: it's just too taxing for the computer to run two versions of my super-complex brief simultaneously.  In the Office 09, you didnt' have the dual screens - just one.  But I never used that either, because when I do use the laptop (meaning, look at it during a presentation), it's only when I can place it in front of me down low, so I use it as a visual feedback (nice conferences provide widescreens for that) so I don't have to turn around and look at the screen at all (except you must do it some, otherwise I feel it creeps the audience out). You want a full-screen representation for that.

So I disable the presenter's mode and voila!  I can now run it on my home theater projector (looks fabulous) and when I factor in some reasonably gaps between clicks to account for my talking, there is no latency issue (even as I'm slowing down my animation and motion in this brief so as to slow down my talking pace for the audience's sake).  I can keep my fancy transitions (which truly are beautiful), and I think I can add back some of the sound effects (which I am cutting back on).

To say I am relieved is a vast understatement.  I built this new brief over many, many days.  It represents about a hundred hours of actual labor but really 10,000 hours of presentational experience.  It also totally exploits Office 2011 for Mac, which is - with all due respect - years ahead of Keynote, which makes it super-easy to have very cool looking briefs but does not come anywhere close to the animation flexibility of MS PPT. It's not even in the same galaxy.  But it is impossible to create an ugly brief in Keynote--unlike PPT.

"Wikipedia meets Facebook" - Wikistrat's Competition on Jpost

Article on the Jerusalem Post Business News featuring Wikistrat's upcoming Grand Strategy Competition

As instability in the Middle East continues to confuse even the world’s most important decision makers, a small Israeli start-up has launched a new wiki-based competition that it hopes will revolutionize grand strategic planning.

Thirty-five teams of students and analysts from leading academic and military institutions including Columbia, Georgetown, Oxford and the United States Air Force have already registered for Wikistrat’s Grand Strategy Competition. It will take place throughout June and will be judged by Dr. Thomas Barnett, former senior adviser to the US secretary of defense, and Michael Barrett, former director of strategy at the White House Homeland Security Council.

Wikistrat CEO Joel Zamel, who together with fellow Australian expat Daniel Green founded the company in Israel last year, said the competition, which they have dubbed “Grand Strategy 2.0,” would provide participants with a “Wikipedia meets Facebook collaborative space for generating content.”

“Generically this kind of work [strategic planning] is done in the form of static reports: that’s the industry standard,” Zamel told The Jerusalem Post. “This is different because it’s wiki-based, allowing strategists and analysts from around the world to collaboratively generate content.”

Read the full article here.

More on the competition at Wikistrat's website

Wikistrat Middle East Monitor, April 2011

We're excited to announce the launch of Wikistrat's Middle East Monitor for April 2011, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

Summary

The biggest changes in April came in Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. These changes do not decisively shift the balance of power in the region but are important developments that could lead to different strategic situations.

The Friday protests in Syria escalate each week, as does the violence. This is not a decisive change from the previous month but shows that there is a strong destabilizing trend in Syria. The uprising has only strengthened in the wake of violent suppression. There are now clashes between soldiers in the 5^th Division in Daraa who have refused orders to shoot civilians, and the 4^th Division, led by Maher Assad, the brother of President Bashar Assad. This could portend a division in the military and security forces.

President Saleh and the opposition parties have agreed to a deal where he would step down within 30 days and then elections would be scheduled. Large-scale violence has continued despite this settlement and it is still possible that Saleh will find a pretext to try to justify a reneging on the agreement. The Gulf Cooperation Council’s intervention in pressuring Saleh to step down is an important development as it shows there are limits to which the Gulf governments are willing to stand by each other in the wake of popular unrest and human rights abuses.

The reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah towards the end of the month is another significant development. It could bolster the Palestinian Authority’s campaign to gain U.N. and international recognition for Palestine as an independent state. The cessation of hostilities between Hamas and Fatah is a dangerous development for Israel, as it means that the Palestinian Authority will not be fully committed to fighting the terrorist group’s operations.

 

Wikistrat Bottom Lines

Opportunities

• The uprising in Syria presents two opportunities for the West: Firstly, it weakens the Assad regime and raises the possibility that it will be overthrown, which would lead to a major strategic shift. Secondly, the violence puts tremendous pressure on the international community including the Arab world to punish the Syrian government. The Assad regime may survive but will be in a much weakened and cautious state.
• The potential for Iran to exploit unrest in the Arab world, along with its pursuit of nuclear weapons and support of terrorism, could make it more likely that Arab states will support tougher sanctions and other measures against the Iranian government.
• The Arab Spring forces the Arab governments and the Iranian regime to focus on internal matters rather than external enemies like the U.S. and Israel. The governments may try to instigate an international crisis, seeking strategic advantages or political stability, but their populations are blaming their rulers for their unsatisfactory conditions and not foreign actors.

Risks

• There is potential for civil war or sectarian violence in Syria, as the regime’s Alawite militia appears loyal. The Alawite minority could also fear a post-Assad Syria, allowing the regime to raise recruits. Any terrorists or Iranian Revolutionary Guards personnel harbored by the Assad regime should also be expected to fight on the regime’s behalf, including against defected military personnel.
• The Iranian regime may seek to solve its political troubles by engaging in foreign conflict, or may simply intervene in Bahrain as a strategic move. Hardline Iranian officials are now openly calling for intervention.
• The reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, though it is unlikely to last, could give Hamas a greater ability to operate. The terrorist group has engaged in increased amount of terrorist attacks against Israel in the past two months.

Dependencies

• The willingness of the Syrian military to follow orders to massacre civilians. This will be the most important factor in judging the future of the revolution in Syria and whether it will be defeated, civil war will ensue or if the Assad regime will fall.
• The calculations of the Iranian government regarding Bahrain. It is not a vital interest of Iran that the Bahraini government fall or that Saudi forces be forced to leave, but these are certainly goals. It is difficult to judge whether the exceptionally-heated rhetoric coming from Iran indicates an actual desire to become deeply involved and if so, what the limits to this intervention would be.
• The limits to which the coalition in Libya is willing to assist the rebels, such as through arms, greater action against Qaddafi or even through the deployment of ground forces.

Join Wikistrat to get access to more reports and live simulations. Click here to learn more on Wikistrat subscriptions.

The Politics Blog: "Life After the Bin Laden Kill: What Now?"

You can take down the wanted posters and run through the streets all you want, but the Osama bin Laden assassination leaves many essential questions unanswered. From Pakistan to China and the Pentagon to the 2012 polls, here's where we stand.

• So who runs Al Qaeda next?
• Will Al Qaeda retaliate?
• Isn't Pakistan is the real battleground — not Afghanistan?
• Is the Great Hunt finally over?
• Did Obama just get tough on terror for 2012?

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

WPR's The New Rules: Glass Half Full on Obama's New National Security Team

President Barack Obama reshuffled his national security team last week, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The White House proclaimed that this was the "strongest possible team," leaving unanswered the question, "Toward what end?" Obama's choices represent the continued reduction of the role of security as an administration priority. That fits into his determined strategy to reduce America's overseas military commitments amid the country's ongoing fiscal distress. Obama foresees a smaller, increasingly background role for U.S. security in the world, and these selections feed that pattern.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Beijing seeks bigger role throughout Asia, making all nervous

WSJ story:  Vice Premier and future premier Li Keqiang in Beijing says the China-Australia needs to move beyond stuff to shared efforts at R&D.  Article also says China eyeing developed countries as they need infrastructure and China has built up tremendous resources on that score.

But all this push scares as well:  FT story on Indonesian private equity firm head decrying growing Chinese investment (China had just agreed to fund about $4b in infrastructure there):

Our state is in the hands of the Chinese and the Koreans.  We allow the foreigners to rape and pillage us.

Get used to the "ugly Chinese."  The soft sell/"charm offensive" is over and China will end up paying for the end of that honeymoon.

Nobody who matters really wants a weak US

Argument from Lee Kuan Yew that fits with everything I've come across in recent work for the USG: those who understand how this world got built are not eager to see the US retreat from its power and influence in continuing to undergird its further development.

LKY:

The world has developed because of the stability America established . . . If that stability is rocked, we are going to have a different situation.

Singapore's old leader (now officially "mentor" to the government) shows how the strong man leaves behind the right sort of system:  he builds it up and then retreats to the background, like Deng Xiaoping and plays mentor.  America, to a certain extent, faces the same evolution.  It's just that we're so given to fits of pique - as in, we're either all-in or all-out.

But the real message here:  it's okay to retreat a bit from the world if the outcome is regeneration.

On the US and China in special interview with WSJ:

Mr. Lee said he thinks a "challenge may come gradually from China," but he doubts China and the U.S. will come into serious conflict anytime soon.  China needs American markets, American investments and American technology, and won't want to "upset the apple cart," he said.

My addendum: and when they may care to, it will be too late, as they'll hit those various walls (demographics, environmental and social decrepitude, resource dependencies, defensiveness and - ultimately - the strong impulse toward democracy) I described last Jan in Esquire.

In the end, says LKY:

I believe the Americans will always have the advantage because of their all-embracive society, and the English language that makes it easy to attract foreign talent.

One of the smartest guys of the 20th century, who blesses us with his wisdom in the 21st.  I rarely disagree with the man, he is so sensible.

New brief great, but problems with presentation

Keynoted this morning in San Diego at Hilton:  North American Electrical Distributors association.  Thursday I spoke in St. Charles IL to Illinois police and firefighter pension managers group.  In both instances, the brief got slower and slower the deeper I went in, meaning slower response to RFID clicker.  All transparent to audience, but it unnerves me to have any uncertainty in my clicking.

Now, when I run the files on my new MacBookPro, it runs like a charm, but when I'm hooked to a monitor, it's like this build-up occurs and there' more latency with each click.  In both briefs it sort of peaked on this one slide that's actually pretty tame, but I'm really confused by the issue.

How can the Mac be just fine clicking through in SlideShow without a monitor feed, and then get slower when connected?

Talked to Mac and they suggested I set up special user account, transfer the file there, and then work PPT in isolation there.  Trick is, to really test it, I need to work it with a projector.  Option is to buy VGA cord and do it with home theater, which is what I probably do.  Other option is to kill the super-sexy and complex new transitions I use in PPT 2011.

The experiments continue.  Advice welcomed.

Meanwhile, I am getting truly psyched about the new brief.  Second time about 75% better than first. Starting to reach my magic zone.  Just need to get my clicking confidence back.