The Leviathan wants to keep its defense intelligence agencies

■"Pentagon's objections block overhaul of U.S. intelligence: Wide support not enough to overcome military concerns,"," by John Diamond, USA Today, 2 November 2004, p. 12A.

Eighty percent of the Intelligence Community's budget is taken up by the defense intelligence and service agencies plus the 600-pound gorillas of the highly technical "overhead" agencies that use vast amounts of technology to look down upon and listen to the rest of the world. Guess what? The Pentagon will fight to not lose budgetary control over those assets, and I don't blame them.

The vast bulk of the IC's budget does go to agencies that essentially serve the Leviathan (aka, combat support agencies), when in reality the desire to have a National Intelligence Director isn't so much about reining in the Leviathan-related intell agencies as it is gathering up the rest of them, most notably the CIA. So a struggle naturally ensues that could be avoided if we admitted that the Leviathan needs its own version of intell, but so does the everything else of the U.S. government.

That's why I have stated in the past that we need to bifurcate the intelligence community just like the Pentagon: one group of agencies to serve the Leviathan in secrecy and whose budget should be under its firm grip, and another to serve the System Administrator force (which, frankly, the Department of Homeland Security should serve as well with its many disaster-relief skill setsóas a colleague of mine Bruce Elleman recently observed). Pretending that a NID ruling over all these intell agencies is the answer is just plain stupid and goes against the bureaucratic reality that says we already have a warfighting force, but what we really need is a peacekeeping force to augment it if we're ever going to get serious about winning real and permanent victories in this war on terror.

Fighting the Pentagon over the budgetary control over the Leviathan's intell agencies is a waste of time and effort. But just watch it drag on for months.

The average road trip day

Dateline: Holiday Day Inn, Arlington VA, 1 November 2004

Flew to DC this morning and drove to DC to brief the CAPSTONE program, a special joint education course for senior military officers run by National Defense University.

On the way there I meet up with a rep from the defense contractor that's sponsoring a defense industry conference tomorrow where I'm speaking. He's got 30 copies of PNM for me to sign. They are being given to all the conference speakers as a gift.

After the 90-minute talk at NDU, I drive to my hotel and check email. Then it's onto to a 3-hour dinner with 13 others who've come together to meet me and discuss PNM's main ideas. The dinner is put together at Ruth's Chris Steakhouse here in Crystal City by a trio of senior analysts/managers from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren VA. I had spoken there about a year ago and, after many requests for me to stop by down there on one of my DC trips to discuss the book with them, these three offered instead to take me out for dinner next night I was in DC. Once the date was set, they contacted 10 of their closest colleagues and friends from their informal network of contacts in various defense contractors, intell agencies, and think tanks, and so tonight ended up being a sort of casual dinner party to discuss PNM in depth.

All in all, a nice way to spend an evening since it's really any author's dream: an extended audience with smart readers who just want to meet you and discuss your book's main ideas. My thanks especially to David Ray and Steve Anderson for setting up this get-together.

The only down side? The day which began at 0730 ends at 2300, but that's fairly standard for me on the road, which is why I always return home somewhat exhausted from the non-stop travel and constant performing.

Here's the daily catch:

■ The new missionaries comeóquite logicallyófrom the New Core

■ The limited logic of reform in the Islamic world

■ 9/11's most pervasive new rule set is classified

■ New Core economies: where is the action is . . .

The new missionaries comeóquite logicallyófrom the New Core

■"Koreans Quietly Evangelizing Among Muslims in Mideast," by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. A1.

■"Afghan Militants Release Video of Hostages" by Carlotta Gall, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. A11.

Fascinating story on Christian missionaries in the Middle East trying to win converts to Christ. That part alone is not new, since the West has been doing that for . . . oh . . . a good millennium or so. What's fascinating is how the new source for these missionaries is the increasingly fervent Christians of South Korea.

Now the joke is that when the Chinese arrive in a new place, they set a restaurant, the Japanese, a factory, but the Koreans, a missionary church.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to spoof this effort whatsoever. I believe in missionaries of all forms: missionaries of security, missionaries of democracy, missionaries of markets, andómost of allómissionaries of a faith that's has meant the world to me personally. Anybody willing to do these difficult tasks of spreading new rule sets in the Gap deserves our utmost respect, just not our blind loyalty.

For in any evangelical mission, the best purpose of spreading your faith (whatever it is), is that it pushes the locals to either improve their own version or abandon it. I have little doubt that when it comes to religion, the vast majority in the Middle East will stick with Islam when confronted with an alternative, but I am likewise certain that just being offered that choice is an important spur toward reform within Islam, simply because it presents the possibility of being both pious and modern in social, economic and political realms. Modernity is not a threat to true believers, confident of their faith. But frankly, if that were true of Islam in the Middle East, there wouldn't be so many radical fundamentalists trying to take the faith "back to the future" of the 7th centuryóthere would be no compelling reason for a reinvigoration of the faith.

Connectivity is all about options: you stay with what you currently have only because you're happy with the options it provides. Globalization is not about always saying yes to new things; it's about having a choice to try new things and say yes to some and no to others. What's so wrong with radical Islam is its attempt to define, in an upstream fashion, what's okay and what's taboo, the ultimate result being the infantilization of the individual (That which I cannot fathom on my own I intrinsically recoil away from.)

And that's a sad of affairs. There's nothing in the experience I can trace of Muslims living inside the Core that says they must be any more or less stressed by modernity than any other religious adherent living in the same environment. Moreover, it's the freedom of all religions inside the Core (or most of it, on a good day) that provides an inherent dampening effect on all of them collectively (if you get too harsh, people simply move on to a faith that better serves their needsósomething going on in China right now to an unusual degree.)

New adherents to new faiths are always the most devote, because it's a recent and very conscious choice for them. So it's no surprise that the new burgeoning population of missionaries in the Gap will come not from Old Core states, but from New Core ones, where the competition of such belief systems tends to be more vigorous.

Godspeed, I say.

But let us remember, there is nothing more impressive than a person willing to put their lives on the line to extend freedom to others. Extending the freedom of faith is God's work (no matter whom you believe in), but just as impressive are those willing to put their lives on the line for helping to bring democracy to Gap states. Like the recently converted religious believers, you will find these "missionaries" come primarily from states that recently moved in more democratic directions (or have suffered the violence of such efforts to move in that direction). The three hostages now held by the Taliban in Afghanistan right now are from Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Philippines, three countries trapped in their own Gapdome in recent decades by all moving in better directions today.

The efforts of such missionaries of democracy are just as important as foreign direct investment flows by multinational corporations into Gap economies and security exports by Core militaries. We need everything and everyone involved in this process of shrinking the Gap.

The limited logic of reform in the Islamic world

■"Concern Rises in Pakistan Of a War Without End: Fear that American policies are fueling militancy," by David Rohde, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. A10.

The Pakistan military on the global war on terrorism:

"O.K., tactically we are getting hold of people here and here and here, but then what's the end?" asked General Sultan, the chief spokesman for Pakistan's military. "Until the time you shut down the factory, you will keep picking up the products. You don't shut down the factory until you resolve the disputes."

This is brilliant code for . . . it's all America's fault. This is (a) complete bullshit and (b) a sign of the limited logic we can expect to get from most of the our Islamic "allies" in this global war on terror.

"Terror would go away," we are told, "if only you'd give up Israel!" It's our support for Israel that accounts for the failed and/or rigidly authoritarian regimes that dominate the Muslim regions of the Middle East and Western Asia. It accounts for why these societies just don't "get" globalization and therefore do so badly at it. It accounts for the lack of broadband economic connectivity between Islamic societies and the global economy. It generates the social tensions arising from exposure to the richer, freer, more decadent West via globalization's creeping embrace of the region. It generates the reality that the only thing the Islamic governments have proven themselves adept at is both repression and hiring Western companies to exploit their oil reservesóand nothing else.

Yes, if we only stopped supporting "aggressive" Israel, then there would be no transnational terrorism, because there would be no social unrest in the region, no broad dissatisfaction with living under repressive regimes, no unhappiness over a lack of economic opportunity, useful education, or effective freedom of speech . . . or even women's rightsófor that matter. No, all of these problems pale in comparison to the great evil done by Israel and abetted by the United States. If the U.S. would only abandon Israel and show more "respect" to Islamic regimes, then Bin Laden and company would disappear from the landscape, never to be heard from again.

Now, I am not doing these arguments justice, because we are told by Islamic regimes that if there was a "broad-based American-led military, political and social effort to eliminate Muslim political grievances and poverty," then regimes like Pakistan could effectively combat Islamic fundamentalists. How so? Such radicals would be stripped of their appeal then.

Right. Osama would lay down his arms in his campaign to dislodge the House of Saud once Israel was reined in, and the Pakistani government would somehow magically regain legitimacy across large swaths of its country-side that it currently does not control, because . . .hey! All the insurgents and warlords and terrorists would submit to their rule once the Palestinian question was solved!

People like to talk about America's oil addiction somehow blinding us to the reality of the Middle East we've had a hand in creating, but tell me whether that "addiction" and "blindness" is anywhere near the sort of self-delusion we constantly hear coming out of these retrograde elites ruling over the region.

Let me tell you, I have no trouble whatsoever understanding Bin Laden's raging contempt for these regimes, even as I find his proposed solution even more loathsome than the current reality.

9/11's most pervasive new rule set is classified

■"Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy: The Future of open government is now up for grabs," editorial by Dorothy Samuels, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. A28.

Good bit about an expanding new security rule set coming out of the 9/11 experience that receives very little press coverage (hmm, must be because it's so secret!).

It is clearly true that the Bush Administration has gone hog wild in expanding the Cone of Government Silence in response to 9/11, which is a direct reversal of what Clinton did. Does that make one administration evil and the other good? Not exactly. It means we were more willing during the Clinton years to think America would not only do better economically but be safer security-wise in a global environment of greater openness. 9/11, not surprisingly, makes us collectively recoil from that vision, but the question is, For how long and how hard?

Did we get careless with info in the 1990s? Sure, it was happening all over society and the economy and government, and privacy was suffering plenty in the process. Now privacy suffers in a different way, or so it would seem (Now it's just the government that wants to know all about you? Come on! Business still does too!).

My problem with the extent and tone of this push for secrecy from the Bush Administration is that it so negatively dovetails with their close-mouthed tendencies in explaining themselves and their national security strategies, instead leaving it to the conspiracy theorists to fill in the many blanks. Of course, when you're as obsessed with secrecy as this White House has often been, what happens too often is that countries that are or should be your allies end up feeling really outside of the loop, which is what gets you the backlash we have today on Iraq, meaning not just the American people but the rest of the Core feel like they were sold a bill of goods on that one.

Samuels' last para says it all:

On a superficial level, the hush-hush treatment of this issue on the fall campaign trail might seem perversely fitting. But Mr. Bush's unilateral rollback of laws and practices designed to promote government accountability surely rates further scrutiny by voters. We've learned over the last four years that what we don't know can hurt us.

Amen, sister.

New Core economies: where is the action is ...

■"Have Supercomputer, Will Travel: A technology pioneer leaves the U.S. for opportunities in China,"," by John Markoff, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. C1.

Some readers will ask me why I concentrate so on the Times, Journal and Post, and my answer is essentially two-fold: (1) when the subject I am tracking or hypothesizing about (in effect, I'm waiting for that article to be written) appears in one or more of these three papers, then I know it's really out there in terms of the mainstream media (so, in effect, these three papers become bloggers of record for me), and (2) these three papers simply field the best journalistsóyear in and year out.

I always read John Markoff in the Times, because his pieces are always right on the edge of my understanding of trends in technology. Today's piece is a good example, because it captures something that makes intuitive sense to me: if you want to be involved with cutting-edge technologies, then New Core powers are great places to be because there you're talking not just about countries struggling mightily to catch up, they're also attracting the most risk-accepting investment flows in the Core and that money is going to players most willing to place big bets on technologies that deal with the biggest problems the Core is facing right now.

Why is that? New Core economies are full of players trying to break into established markets, so they need to come up with compelling products that meet compelling needs. That's because New Core states are more under the gun than Old Core states to deal with the most pressing issues of mature developmentólike environmental damage, the push for hydrogen, new forms of urban architecture and development, etc. These issues are all far more compelling for China and India because of the explosive nature of the economic growth there, which triggers lotsa social and political change and pressures.

So you get this interesting phenomenon of the best tech brains that once came to America because that was the one great place to do what motivated them most (to innovate) now returning to their New Core homelands. This article is about a supercomputer genius, Taiwan-born Steve Chen, deciding to emigrate to mainland China because that's where the work andómost importantlyóthe funding is taking him:

Supercomputing is being seized upon by the Chinese government to help speed the nation's transition from low-cost manufacturing to becoming a more powerful force in the world economy. China's leaders know that high-speed computing is essential to global leadership in scientific fields and advanced design of a variety of sophisticated products.

"Right now the Chinese have started to pay attention; they are catching up and they learn fast," said Mr. Chen, 60 . . ..

How does the Pentagon come to understand this trend? No surprise: they only see the military application threat:

Military intelligence experts in this country have long been concerned that supercomputing capabilities may aid China's weapons development. But many technologists and economists say that blazing computing speeds alone do not represent a particularly new nuclear weapons threat. Instead, they are more concerned that the Chinese may catch up more quickly with the United States in areas that have economic and scientific, rather than military, ramifications.

The latter analysis being what I mean when I say the Pentagon needs to move beyond defining war solely within the context of war instead of within the context of everything else. The future of any conflict or competition with China isn't going to be about their catching up or surpassing us in killing technologies, but in connecting technologies. And by that I mean technologies that allow China to become more pervasively connected to the global economy than we are.

For now, China's connectivity is mostly about sucking up raw materials and sending out manufactured goods, whereas America's has long been about exporting technology + media/cultural content and importing consumer goods. China aims to break into the exporting technology market and that connective influence will likely define China's global reach far more than any imaginary military power projection.

Such computing now occupies a central role throughout the global economy, providing stark proof that decades-long American attempts to control the flow of advanced information-processing technologies are largely moot. It is only a matter of time, experts says, before companies in places like China, India and Russia essentially match the capabilities of the American and Japanese leaders.

"When they really get noticed," said Horst D. Simon, director of the computation center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, "will be when a country like Malaysia or Australia decides to buy a supercomputer from a Chinese company like Mr. Chen's rather than from I.B.M."

Bingo!

Isn't it amazingóas well as counter-intuitiveóto remember back to the time when our policy towards the old Soviet bloc was: "For God's sake, don't let them get their hands on information technology!" Whenóin the endóthat was the very thing (that Information Revolution) that served as the downfall of the socialist, centrally-planned economic system? The Sovs could boss their way through the industrial and petro-chemical revolutions, but what they could never master was the info revolution, because it demands horizontal connectivity from a system that inherently distrusted all such bonds.

Thank God, I say, that we were as unsuccessful as we were, because with the old socialist system dies the state-based war system of the 20th century. What comes in its place may seem more complex, at first glance, but that only means we haven't enunciatedómuch less masteredóthe new rule sets that define this era. For while mutual-assured destruction and the old Cold War concepts of deterrence effectively rule out great power-on-great power war, they don't rule out the everything else that we confront today. In fact, by disconnecting the escalation phenomenon from war, we entered into a new age with the fall of Soviet blocóone in which lighting a nuke in a major US city would not automatically segue into global nuclear Armageddon (hence we're safer in the ultimate sense even as we're more vulnerable in the proximate senseóunless, of course, you happen to reside in THAT city!).

The key now is to figure out how to reduce that proximate vulnerability as well (transnational actors looking to use WMD), and that's what PNM is all about.

You know, when I was in China, I was told by my hosts that my material and vision were too sophisticated for American audiences, meaning requiring too much of a balance between opposing concepts (or what they call the yin-yang). One of the international relations experts said I'd be better off working for the Chinese, because (1) they'd understand my stuff better and (2) China has more pressing and challenging processes to master in terms of their foreign policy (meaning China offers IR experts like myself a tougher nut to crack!).

It's true that trying to sell the Theory of Peacefully Rising China is hard (I won't tell you how many China experts on my side will tell you it's all a ruse to confuse us as China prepares to rule the world . . . or is it just retake Taiwan?), but frankly, I find I have my hands full with just trying to see the Theory of Benevolently Dominating America.