It's About Time

The State Department has recently announced that it will direct diplomats to serve in Iraq. In the spirit of creating a true unity of effort, in my mind, this is long overdue. The people best suited to nourishing a fledgling judicial system are not soldiers. They're people from the Department of Justice. The people best suited to developing an alternative to poppy/opium based agriculture are not soldiers - it's professionals from the Department of Agriculture. Either the nation is at war, or it isn't. I hope to see similar initiatives/incentives for the rest of the interagency community.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/27/AR2007102700223.html

Gratuitous Post

This post has nothing to do with shocks or trends, except to the extent it's shocking I got so close to two Nashville Predators Cheerleaders. Who knew the NHL had cheerleaders? What other surprises lurk in the battlespace?

Netroots, meet world

There's bit a great deal of discussion about the netroots concept in terms of a U.S. elections and domestic policy, but are there larger, strategic implications?

I ask this because recently I attend a showing of the documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback" about an observer to the cease fire in Sudan. After the showing of the film, there was a discussion period with the audience and several traditional grassroots organizations. The head of the local chapter of Amnesty International, STAND (Students for Taking Action Now in Darfur), and a few other smaller peace organizations were there.

The discussion, somewhat predictably with an audience of mostly true believers, largely stuck to safe ground: the tragedy of it all, the way the Iraq war has hamstrung the U.S. from perhaps a more constructive role, the fact that the troubles of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton get more attention than the dying in Sudan.

But then an older gentelman stood up and proposed that if the U.S. was too short on troops, perhaps Americans should head over with guns themselves. Surprisingly, this was not greeted with outright derision and indeed, the next speaker not only seconded that motion, but went on to call for action with words to the effect of "If the U.S. government won't do anything, then by golly the American people should raise the money and hire Blackwater and send them ourselves."

And the crowd applauded.

So, I would then ask - while this might seem absurd on the surface - paying someone else to fight a war- is it entirely so? Could a grassroots/netroots campaign build the kind of support where people are willing to pay for such action? Could the people, in effect, take control of foreign policy in some circumstances?

Blackwater, for example has received an estimated $300 billion in contracts since the outset of the Iraq war. Is it inconceivable that a George Soros or other geo-political extraterratorial actor could lead such a charge?

Back to Mahan?

Another very important article from Robert Kaplan. America's Elegant Decline revisits the question of our ability to shape events in the Eurasian mainland. Our military power far exceeds that of any combination of opponents. However, in terms of demographics and economic prowess, the U.S. is entering a phase where others are catching up, and eventually, our military ability to shape events will reflect this reality.

Kaplan's article is interesting in that he is trying to think forward, past our current focus on Counterinsurgency and Stability operations. How will the U.S. shape a national security strategy that is within our power to execute? I believe that a powerful mental adjustment may be underway within the American mind -- the world is a big place, and is too large for us to be engaged decisively everywhere. We will increasingly withdraw from Eurasia and focus on key relationships around the world, such as Japan, the U.K., and India, to name but a few. The future of U.S. military forces will turn to Navy to allow us to access Eurasia and ensure communications with our allies. Our Aerospace forces will be used in a similar role. The future of our ground forces will be smaller, more mobile, and will be geared to lower our profile and achieve more tailored and discrete missions to shape the Eurasian environment to our liking.

Semper Fi, Marine

Today we pause from our "deep thoughts" to remember one warrior, one Marine. "Hap" died on Wednesday night. He was a great Marine and friend and will be missed.

Click here for the news clip...

Whose Empire; Whose Mind?

Following the thread 1st SeaLord illustrated in his last post, I found this quote from the recent Washington Post Story about improvised explosive devices in Iraq highly illuminating:

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. "If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week," a former Pentagon official said.

"The Empires of the Future are the Empires of the Mind" is more than a cool header for our blog. It means something to me, in that I believe that world of the future will quite literally be shaped by those most at home with communicating and using the infosphere to their advantage. Individual Americans (including, i might add, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the field) are increasingly at home in this environment. Unfortunately at operational, strategic, and political military levels of war, our government is increasingly out of its league. Enormous time and effort is spent formatting, controlling, labeling, copying, and filing information. Much, much less is spent on actually creating and sharing it. Increasingly, our industrial-age information sharing structures are breaking down, and it is playing severe havoc with our ability to create themes and to shape the environment. It's a theme to which I will return in future posts. If our government cannot adapt to the future international environment, how free peoples create their own information-age modes of organization to attend to their security needs? Western polities unleashed as 4th generation warfare actors will be formidable indeed.