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.
