Don

I highly recommend that the contributors to the book set up a web site similar to the Numbers web site (anti-illegal immigration) that tries to get subscribers (very successfully) to fill out their fax form and they will send it on our behalf to our local politicians to do such things as save eVerify which remains the only federal program that worked with near perfect performance verifying that YOUR SSN was not used illegally by an illegal alien. Several pre-selected text examples are provided or one can create one of their own. The “bulletin board” shows all available concners that one can fax or phone their concerns about.

I would certainly contribute to such an effort if you could craft faxes and emails that are NOT quite as radical as the ones found on the numbers website. We need to show more respect for those whose opinions we seek to change than the web site described seems to care about.

Although I admire the efforts of this resurrected Defense Reform Movement, I also must say that it is taking a really good and sound theoretical foundation, Boyd Strategic Theory, and beating it to death. This is especially apparent to me when I read about the ideas of reforming the Navy. However, I also find it when I read with distress the pieces on the Army by MacGregor and Wilson (both Inside the Beltway heroes to me.)

I ask the folks who made the effort to put this anthology together to once again go down the proven road of regressive planning: what are the endstates we want; what are the ways, and what are the means that fit. Finally, what are the risks of the ways and means we choose. What I read is that we have jumped from the JIPOE (Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operating Environment) – aka Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield/Battlespace – to the solutions without much analysis or synthesis in between. It’s a common enough problem to a now-academic like me with post-graduate students of joint military operations. The students, all military officers of all services at the O-3/O-4 level, just get going into the force structure detail without too much discussion about the whys and hows of the structure. They have been very much attuned by their recent experience to being at the very tip of the spear, and their thinking tactically reflects that.

But this anthology is supposedly written for the strategic and, at the most detail, the operational leadership of this country’s national security community. In that regard, I do find it lacking – perhaps because the trace of the thinking is not well explained in the text. Perhaps there are implicit connections that the authors have, and believe are shared. Indeed, that was a common enough failing for the first generation of the Defense Reform Movement.

Let’s learn from the first generation. We need to explicitly address the issues of soft power. We need to once and for all come to grips with what information is and what it does for us in terms of national security; we are betting the farm on this concept and we don’t have a good technical grasp of what the damned thing means, and what it implies. To illustrate this, I find that among my Info Ops students, including those who are familiar with Boyd’s Theories (mostly Marines), NOT ONE is familiar with Shannon/Weaver information theory; NOT ONE is familiar with recent cognitive research with respect to Information Overload and Deprivation, particularly with respect to military operations (yes, the Army did this research 25 years ago); NOT ONE is familiar with the limits of Godel Theorems and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles – not the plural, not the singular!!! – and most of all, NOT ONE is familiar with Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

Now if you, the reader, don’t know or are unfamiliar with these ideas, then you dear friend are part of the problem, not the solution to Defense Reform. You are no better than the BOGSATs and BOCSATs that abound Inside the Beltway talking trash as if they know what information is – think of the ridiculous FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE BS we have imposed on our troops.

Most importantly, we need a new lexicon. Just saying and arguing 4th Generation Warfare doesn’t make it real. It just makes it a slogan. We need to understand, in a deep way, the new language that defines our information-rich age: not the classical Newtonian approaches that continues to be used in such problematic (a nice word) doctrine as JP 3.0 and JP 5.0, all the while claiming to be so post-modern and hip with information and effects.

No, we need a lexicon that enables us to critique and develop alternatives that encompasses the real world – th quantum world. That lexicon would include adaptations and extensions of concepts like entropy, like entanglement, like superposition, like coherence and decoherence, and non-localized action.

Folks, I know most of us had problems getting through Calculus 101, but the world, unfortunately for us liberal arts fellows, is far more mathematical than it is verbal. We must adapt; we must learn, un-learn and re-learn; and most of all, we must be able to communicate to the rest of the concerned constituencies of national security in ways they can understand, grasp, accept and implement.

Until then, all we do is add to the noise.

The traditional approach of second-rate powers that seek to subvert dominant naval powers, such as the United States is today, is to engage in commerce raiding: the Confederate Alabama, the German U-boats, Drake and his Sea Dogs, and many others.

The uptick in piracy from Somalia provides a model for how commerce raiding might proceed in the 21st century.

In any event, the United States needs to secure the sea lanes for commercial shipping and cannot simply take that security for granted.

Would like to secure at least three copies of the book – one for myself and two for CGSC classmates who are looking for far more than what the system is offering.

I’m also going to send you an e-mail within 24 hours that describes how the economic collapse is going to occur from the point of view of one of the major investment/trading houses on Wall St. I think you will find it quite interesting to read, and perhaps give some insight to how this is going to pan out.

Ski