Paul Kane on Reforming the Military
I’m of the opinion that Gates’ supposid sweeping reforms aren’t nearly enough (indeed, they barely scratch the surface), so I read Kane’s piece in the NYT today.
He wants to: distribute the Air Force among the other services, ditch “up or out,” and a national ‘service program’ without deferment.
The first one makes sense – though large chunks of each branch of military should be outsourced to private contractors – in fact everyone but highly trained shooters. The second also makes sense – the Israeli concept is great and there’s no good reason we don’t have MBA’s join the military as O-5’s.
The third however, is a waste of time and resources – it’s an attempt to ‘surge’ the state – and that is destined for failure. In the worst case, we would have just distributed dangerous skill sets to an entire generation of angry young men.
‘Resilient Nation’
Charlie Edwards of Demos has a great new report out titled “Resilient Nation“.
It really parallels my own work on the topic (if you’d like to see the chapter I wrote on it, ‘Reconfiguring the National Security Architecture’ let me know. It’s gotten some play in the DoD and disaster tech circles). Anyway, Edwards did a great job pulling lessons from a variety of local examples throughout the U.K. I will probably do the same in my book on India.
Diaspora Resiliency
Something to consider: There’s a narrative in place (complete with 12 steps) for in-place alternatives (community tribes) to the nation state to ramp back up to sustainable strength. While family linkages are generally strong within immigrant social networks, they are ill-suited to collective security/coping with D2.
Familial tribes are far too geographically distributed to function, so they’ll have to rely on either integration (participating in the primary network in the area they’re in) or cluster together with fellow immigrant groups (traditionally segmented by race/religion/ethnicity/language etc). Or, diasporas will have to collapse back ‘home’ (often a mythical place).
Accelerating this transition, without also accelerating the separation of social fault lines, will be a very tough problem to solve.
Idea: PackMule
iPhone and any other GPS enabled cell. Its peer to peer package delivery.
Get package senders and receivers (‘packs’) to sign up as such. (Benefits to them: decreases risk, cheaper and more available than USPS UPS). Get (couriers) ‘mules’ to sign up as such. (Mules get paid to do deliveries.)
When a pack has a delivery to be made, they throw up a red flag. Mules see these flags and can submit a request to deliver. Packs review their reputation points, profile and approve. Mule shows up, takes package.
Packs: using their dashboard, they can track the status of the mule, and also set up options (how many blind cutouts they want, dead drops, code phrases etc)
Mules: have a deadline (Can be adjusted in real time based on location of next mule) to get package to a waypoint. Won’t know if its final destination or not. Won’t know what’s in package.
This way, you can get a package across the city securely, quickly, and also complexly enough to confuse anyone with their eyes on your stuff.
On Tracking Entrepreneurship
This article in TheStreet tracks a boom in entrepreneurship with the lame metric of how many MBA kids are taking courses in entrepreneurship.
A much better approach would be to see participation in entrepreneurial competitions (because of the hard dollars involved).