Looking in the Government Mirror
Top 25 think tanks were cited 17% less than last year. This is the third year of decline.
Wish that meant something, but FAIR tracks this data by seeing how many times various tanks were referenced by the media. The market for think tanks isn’t you and me, its government, and if current policy fiascos are any indication, pretty much anything GWOT related, it looks like they’re still turning to these sources for thinking.
And they have an imperative to do so, because as the 08 election timer runs down, everyone in government is looking for somewhere to hover (just in case).
Bloated Census
Big worries for the nation’s first high-tech census should have been obvious when tests showed some of the door-to-door headcounters couldn’t figure out their fancy new handheld computers.Now, officials say, technology problems could add as much as $2 billion to the cost of the 2010 census and jeopardize the accuracy of the nation’s most important survey.
Census officials are considering a return to using paper and pencil to count every man, woman and child in the nation.
At more than $11 billion, the initial cost of the 2010 census was already the most expensive ever
Internal Military Think Tanks
A comment by Andy on John’s site that resonates with me:
Remember that this is an Army that took 6 years to produce a new Operations Field Manual despite being involved in two wars.
This is an Army that shelved all the counterinsurgency lessons learned into SF and simply told everyone else to forget about Vietnam.
This is an Army that took over three years producing a new Counterinsurgency Manual (the initial “research” started in 2004 and the manual was released in 2007).
Even Frank Hoffman has tried to minimize 4GW in his “Hybrid War” brief. He states that the theorists involved with it (which really means Lind) have not provided anything to help defeat it. Which is untrue – the FMFM 1-A was written and revised at least three times since 03, and Lind’s Marine seminar with Captains at Quantico has also produced a number of Tactical Decision Exercises, and I think they have been working on a Tactics manual as well.
Of course, Lind does not get paid a dime, the seminar he runs is in addition to all the other coursework the Marines have to do (it’s not credited), and Lind doesn’t belong to RAND, the Army War College, Quantico, or any governmental think tank. In simpler terms, he’s not one of them, and so he must be discredited because he is a threat. Anyone who is a threat to the funding must be discredited…this is SOP for the military these days.
You’d think the stupid bastards, after 7 years of stalemate, would have offered Lind and others positions at the War College, SAMS, or some other think tank…it just shows how inward focused these people are.
Staffing Firms
Not sure what the point is of hiring one of these firms if all they’re doing is replicating with your own employment ad on Monster. In essence, they’re competing with you.
The real power of staffing firms is derived from their networks. (Wonder if any have put social network analysis into good use?)