Shloky.com 3.0
Just FYI for the RSS readers – I have put in place a new design. The last one was dull and lacking in features and to top it off was mucking up my formatting.
In addition to the better look the back-end has been revamped so comments will now be published immediately upon clicking submit (provided your math is correct).
Things I still have to do: Put together an About page, re-categorize everything, put together a repository of open source reading material.
Share your opinions and/or any bugs you may come across. Thanks.
-Shlok
Preventing Military Network Balkanization
Kent’s Imperative does some smart thinking on a DoD+ wide platform (+ because he wants to tie in OSI and other agencies). He puts out a list of required capabilities. This seems to mesh with the work that everyone else has been outlining in our little sector of the blogosphere.
Ralph Peters Descends Into Irrelevance
NYP – Peters continues to lose it (but for some bizarre reason is able to maintain a media presence) –
With political correctness permeating our government and even the upper echelons of the military, we never tried the one technique that has a solid track record of defeating insurgents if applied consistently: the rigorous imposition of public order.
That means killing the bad guys. Not winning their hearts and minds, placating them or bringing them into the government. Killing them.
Bin Laden is a Minor Player
UPI –
The march towards decentralized self sufficient autonomous units with their own recruitment mechanisms continues –
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden now has only minor influence on radical Islamists because of the Internet, a U.S. Military Academy study suggests.
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, N.Y., called its study the “first systematic mapping” of the Islamic holy war and found more ideological training was going on in chat rooms and online forums, The New York Times reported.
COIN Is Obsolete In A 5GW Context
Standard COIN thinking centers on winning support of the populace which makes up the cloud-like networked supply line of insurgencies. In doing so insurgents lose their base of support including funding, recruitment and protection. This undertaking is referred to as “draining the swamp”.
Bleeding edge warriors, Global Guerrillas, lay claim to black globalization as their supply system. Their swamp is a global networked cloud with transactions amounting to somewhere around $3 trillion annually. They are empowered by this alternative system. The world is their swamp.
Looking ahead it becomes clear that as super empowered individuals rise they will progressively swallow that cloud. SEI’s inherently internalize the supply line. Their self sufficiency makes up a major chunk of their empowerment. The global swamp becomes a global ocean as the muck consolidates into itself.
The ascension of this of this global interconnected ocean, this global platform renders classic “draining the swamp” efforts obsolete. Without a supply line, a networked cloud, to target COIN doctrine collapses.
But, as the time of 4GW has not yet passed, if properly applied classic COIN can be leveraged to decelerate the rise of super empowered individuals. The problem with such caveats as “properly” is they are rarely heeded.