Coburn On Tax Dollars
A step in the right direction – this is an attempt to service the government’s customers – if it comes to pass.
PMC Adoption Curve
PRESENT
Current PMCs are innovators focusing on an early adopter customer base on the adoption curve, because their target customer base is so small – namely states who can afford their prices and have a purpose to utilize their products. This is the focus of the major players – as evidenced by Blackwater’s latest brigade size product offering and DynCorp selecting and training Liberia’s military.
FUTURE
The chasm is actually an extended upward slope on the adoption curve, which has been removed for aesthetic reasons and replaced by a chasm to allow Geoffrey A. Moore to make his million. It does however illustrate a point previously made here – when the current market is saturated/reaching efficiency a tipping point will be reached (also called potential, maximal point or the chasm) sparking radical innovation to garner increased profits.
Current trends hint that we are somewhere beyond the innovator stage, in the early adopter phase and approaching the chasm.
In the period immediately after the chasm we can hope to see the positive effects of privatization as new rule sets emerge. Competition will center around specific points (economy of violence, efficiency, cost effectiveness etc)
RAMIFICATIONS
The major impact made by PMCs will come as the state evolves (decentralization due to security concerns, market state) and the customer base expands (causing the amount of primary competitors to increase). Gradually that customer base will approach 100%.
Bottom up self regulation is caused by market forces- data proves customers stop buying products that offend them. Past the chasm this is likely to prove to be the case. The period of concern is the transition period between now and then. The shifting rule set is a time of great uncertainty.
*While I have an idea as to how long this process will take, I am not comfortable making a prediction at this time. I may in the future as the fog clears and trends become more apparant.
Net Centric Warfare and Emergence
Sonny and Wiggins make the argument that emergence will take care of NCW, but the downside is that takes too long.
NCW does not need “proponents”. It just comes naturally.
As the first generation of digital natives begins to work its way though the ranks of the military, these ideas of information sharing will cease to be policies and become assumptions. Do you think that people who grew up blogging, IMing and googling are going to hit the DoD and all of a sudden accept stovepiped systems? Hell no! Digital natives don’t name this stuff, they do it.
Which is true. But this is demonstrative of the fact that the innovation cycle of the the DoD is tremendously long. By the time NCW becomes SOP we will be facing new threats who have a handle on how to exploit it. This graphic shows how NCW is adopted by the state structure –
Shooting the Messenger
Olivier Guitta apparently completely does not understand how Google works and embarks on a tirade against Google News indexing Al Manar’s news feed. Google does not do business with any of the news providers on Google News. It searches thousands of news sites and aggregates them in a single location.
Just another pathetic attempt at controlling information in an age of unprecedented availability.
Get Out of Our Neighborhood
NYT – The rich kick out the poor in rebuilding New Orleans, with local government support –
Up and down Louisiana, but particularly around New Orleans, residents and local officials have taken action against the incursion of displaced city residents — overwhelmingly black — who are portrayed as bearers of crime and bad living habits, and as destroyers of property values.
And by the end of last year, 32 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes had banned these trailer sites. Only eight had approved them unconditionally.
Illustrates what is likely to happen in the future.