Link Updates
Just added FX Based to the Smart Blogs on the right side. Sonny is an AF Officer watching the security environment change from the inside. Phatic Communion is now dead and has been removed. Good luck Curtis.
Iran, Circa 1979
Desert One Debacle by Mark Bowden (of Black Hawk Down fame) at The Atlantic Monthly – great article.
Shooting The Messenger II
Partly due a post of mine the Counterterrorism Blog attempts to defend and continue its misguided march against Google News indexing Al Manar. What this attempt is designed to do is unclear – getting rid of the middle man does not actually do anything. It is the equivalent of shooting a TV – the network doesn’t stop broadcasting – nor do they lose a significant part of their target market (in this case www.almanar.com still exists). It reeks of flag waving paranoia (as evidenced by its clueless supporters).
The kicker is: most of these guys decried Google when it “sold out” to China.
What this effort actually does is illustrate a deficiency on the part of counterterror experts* the world over – they are facing the same rule set shift the CIA is as illustrated here –
Simply put, the CIA and the government as a whole are having a hard time dealing with broadband international connectivity and the sheer amount of associated information. People whose lives have revolved around controlling and manipulating information are now being forced to adapt to an environment where they simply can not.
Denying Americans information about terrorists (yes, even directly from a terrorist entity) is a Doom Loop exercise – explanation here – in an effort to continue “their” attempts at providing security they lose sight of the customer’s needs – “us”. They will not be able to prevent all or even a majority of attacks, this is the nature of fourth and fifth generation warfare. A well informed public is an aware public is one that can effectively comprehend and react to a potential threat.
Those calling for this course of action were irrelevant on 9/11, will be irrelevant when a nuclear weapon detonates on American soil (the last symbolic terrorist attack) and will be relics when global guerrillas utilize open source networks to attack our critical systems. (Look out, Google indexes all three of these sites, which are potentially beneficial to terrorists!)
*I use the term “counterterror expert” loosely. The entire community is quickly becoming a white elephant as it focuses on organizational terror while it is being rapidly supplanted by open source terror. Mainstream just doesn’t get it. (Too long a collective OODA loop).
On Speed
BusinessWeek – Good article on speedy innovation becoming a primary focus in the private sector –
Speed is emerging as the ultimate competitive weapon. Some of the world’s most successful companies are proving to be expert at spotting new opportunities, marshaling their forces, and bringing to market new products or services in a flash…
It’s all being driven by a new innovation imperative. Competition is more intense than ever because of the rise of the Asian powerhouses and the spread of disruptive new Internet technologies and business models. Companies realize that all of their attention to efficiency in the past half-decade was fine — but it’s not nearly enough. If they are to thrive in this hypercompetitive environment, they must innovate more and faster.
Aside from the obvious application to future terrorism, here are some off the cuff sporadic thoughts –
FUTURE
The new ultracompetitive economy is taking shape within the context of the market state. Anyone positioned to take advantage of increased privatization (Blackwater, Halliburton) can (and will) make a lot during the transition, although these types of companies will lose as the nation state/market state overlap ends – they are too focused on absorbing the current governmental systems and are inheriting the flaws in those systems (mass, hierarchy etc) and will be ill suited to adapt to a decentralized governmental system.
INDIVIDUAL OPPORTUNITY
Anyone with the ability to quickly recognize opportunities and take advantage of them – or in other terms a streamlined and effective OODA Loop – will be in a position to quickly (no more working your way up a large hierarchy) make a significant impact and generate large personal and collective profits. Such loops emerge when an individual is placed in a system and can not be “Big Banged” into existence – education helps, but it is not enough. This is not a question of natural intelligence, though that is a factor, but of drive, ambition, experience, widespread horizontal knowledge, the ability to penetrate vertically, self reflection.
COMPETITIVE EDGE
The important thing to remember is speed is not the primary focus when getting inside someone elses OODA Loop, being more in touch with the environment is. He will quickly spiral off into irrelevance if you exploit the difference between his assumptions and the actual system in place. This is the gap to exploit. It increasingly depends on your loop being above par though.
TRENDS TO WATCH
The amount of varying jobs the average individual holds in a lifetime is increasing (more experiences = better loop). Wealth polarization increases as competition does. Innovation becomes increasingly mainstream – as evidenced by the advent of social entrepreneurs (who are now replacing hierarchical charitable NGOs) and the article itself – which makes it harder for innovation to gain profits which loops to fuel innovation.
(Some of this was drawn from this discussion.)
I apologize for the multiple updates and posts, WordPress has some major formatting issues.
Ed Leamer Reviews Friedman
This is a massive review of Friedman’s The World Is Flat with a focus on “economic geography, trade theory, and recent economic history”. Written by UCLA’s Ed Leamer. Via Marginal Revolution