Category: Communities of Practice

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Journal: Special Operations Forces Vital in War

Military
Marcus Aurelius Recommends
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Very hard to disagree with anything this article says.    ((HOWEVER)), increasing special operations forces (SOF) is constrained by a set of iron laws, the five “SOF Truths”:
1.  Humans are more important than hardware.
2.  Quality is more important than quantity.
3.  Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
4.  Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after an emergency occurs.
5.  Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
To put a fine point on it, if we try to crank up the pipeline now, we may not get significant benefit before the Presidentially-mandated disengagement point for Afghanistan.  Then, we could find ourselves, as we did after Vietnam, over-resourced with special operators.  Some of us can remember standing on a PT field at Fort Bragg every morning in 1976-77-78 and receiving the latest play-by-play as to whether our Special Forces Group was going to be deactivated in the post-Vietnam drawdown.  Other elements of the US Government can relate similar experiences.
If there is a bright side to this, IMHO, it would be that there does not today appear to be the antipathy toward SOF on the part of conventional forces that existed during the Vietnam era.  A former colleague, well known for competence and dedication to some of you, visited his Army assignments officer while assigned as an A-Detachment commander in the 10th Special Forces Group, then at Fort Devens, MA.  His assignments officer told him, “… see, you're not soldiering. …”  I think that is less of a problem today, but I'm not sufficiently sanguine to believe that the knife fights will not recur as resources tighten while conflicts and attendant requirements persist indefinitely.
V/R,
Bill
(BEGIN TEXT)

USA Today
December 27, 2010
Pg. 6

Special Ops Forces Vital In War

U.S. increases the elite troops to meet demand

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today

Phi Beta Iota: Not mentioned in the article are the fact that Private Military Contractor (PMC) firms have been allowed to rape, pillage, and loot the ranks of Special Forces.  Retaining highly-qualified individuals and outsourcing indiscriminately are a contradiction.
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Tom Atlee Sends: 10 Hopeful, 5 Overlooked Stories

11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence

5 Overlooked Stories (CSM)

1. Stuxnet
2. TARP is Cheap
3. Common School Standards
4. Rise of Natural Gas
5. Twilight of the Desktop

20 Hopeful Stories (YES! Magazine)

1.    Climate Crisis Response Takes a New Direction
2.    Wikileaks Lifts the Veil
3.    Momentum is Building for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
4.    Resilience is the New Watchword
5.    Health Care—Still in Play
6.    Corporate Power Challenged
7.    A local economy movement is taking off
8.    Cooperatives Make a Comeback.
9.    A Turn Away from Homophobia
10.   Social Movements Still Our Best Hope

Full details below the line

Continue reading “Tom Atlee Sends: 10 Hopeful, 5 Overlooked Stories”

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Journal: Analysis of STUXNET, Iran, and US Vulnerability

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement
Berto Jongman Recommends...

David Albright, Paul Brannan, and Christina Walrond

22 December 2010, Preliminary Assessment

Did Stuxnet Take Out 1,000 Centrifuges at the Natanz Enrichment Plant?

10 pages

Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS)

Phi Beta Iota: US Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) computer systems are still on the Internet and still very vulnerable to internal and external interference, as well as the standard 50% “errors and omissions” that come with sloppy computer work so characteristic of US vendors.  Many sounded the alarm in 1990 (Winn Schwartau, Peter Black) through 1994 (Robert Steele, various field grade officers at the Air War College) but no one wanted to listen.  The US is as close to a complex melt-down (political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, natural-geographic) as we have witnessed in our lifetime.

See Also:

1998 TAKEDOWN: Targets, Tools, & Technocracy

1995 Military Perspective on Information Warfare: Apocalypse Now

Although other papers have been written since then, the three “originals” in the author's view are Major Gerald R. Hust, “Taking Down Telecommunications”, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1993); Major Thomas E. Griffith, Jr., “Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems”, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1994; and H. D. Arnold, J. Hukill, and A. Cameron of the Department of the Air Force, “Targeting Financial Systems as Centers of Gravity: ‘Low Intensity' to ‘No Intensity' Conflict”, in Defense Analysis (Volume 10 Number 2, pages 181-208), 1994.

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Journal: US Corporations Growing Outside US, No Jobs In US

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

I received this email from a close friend, a Republican of the old school:

“When 50+ years ago Engine Charlie Wilson said what's good for General Motors is good for America, he was mostly right. Now corporations have turned that aphorism on its head.”

Tuesday, Dec 28, 2010 08:03 ET

Where are the jobs? Overseas, of course

American consumers have little to do with the big profits many top American corporations are now racking up

By PALLAVI GOGOI, Associated Press

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

EXTRACT: Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous. In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society. He exhorted business leaders to find a way to link growth with job creation at home.

Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.

“We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people,” says Sachs. “In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that.”

Read complete article at Salon.com….

See Also:

Reference: 2011 Brave New Dystopia

Search: US fraud tri-fecta

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Journal: Special Forces, Gay Men, and Co-Ed Showers

Cultural Intelligence, Military
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Army invited attention to following article in this morning's daily “Stand-To” e-mail.

Special forces wary of ‘don't ask, don't tell' repeal

By Rowan Scarborough

The Washington Times

6:39 p.m., Monday, December 27, 2010

Read full article…

EXTRACT: The working group's report contained this observation: “These survey results reveal to us a misperception that a gay man does not ‘fit' the image of a good warfighter – a misperception that is almost completely erased when a gay service member is allowed to prove himself alongside fellow warfighters.

“Anecdotally, we heard much the same. As one special-operations force warfighter told us, ‘We have a gay guy [in the unit]. He's big, he's mean, and he kills lots of bad guys. No one cared that he was gay.' ”

Said Adm. Worthington: “It just depends on how they comport themselves. If they start breaking out the bows and the earrings in the barracks, that might cause a little trouble. That becomes a good order and discipline sort of thing. The services are going to have to tighten up on regulations.”

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Worth a Look: Communications, Communities, & Modalities

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Policies, Threats
Tom Atlee at Phi Beta Iota

Seven years ago Tom Atlee, our mentor on collective intelligence and community self-organization for resilience and sustainability, began focusing on “ways of communicating.”  Responding to a recent query from us about alternatives to partisan politics or dictatorships, he offered up the below links, each of which has many other links, as food for reflection.

1.  Designing Multi-Process Public Participation Programs

2. A map of Community Intelligence and some of its important constituents

3.  Approaches to Community Engagement and the Generation of Community Wisdom

The latter offers a 1-paragraph description of each of almost 50 processes).

And, of course, there is Tree Bressen et al

4. A Pattern Language for Group Process

Below is a general commentary he offered on “modalities” as a mixed bag.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Communications, Communities, & Modalities”

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Worth a Look: Cultural Survival Call to Action

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Huichol Call to Action

Huichol Call to Action

VER ESPANOL ABAJO

Dear Colleagues for Human Rights and Environmental Justice,

The Wixárika (Huichol) people of Mexico are calling for international support to protect their sacred lands from a Canadian mining company. Please join Cultural Survival in sending urgent emails, faxes, or letters to Mexican government officials.

Seventy percent of First Majestic Silver Corporation's concessions at Real de Catorce (San Luis Potosí state) lie within the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserve. Recognized as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Wirikuta Reserve was created to protect the Wixárika people's most sacred sites and the rare, fragile ecosystem of the Real de Catorce desert, where the diversity of cactus species is the highest in the world.  Mining would consume enormous amounts of water in this arid region, pollute the groundwater with heavy metals including cyanide, impact the tourism-based economy of the picturesque Real de Catorce town, affect endangered bird species and wildlife habitats, and pose a high risk to human health.

For more information, please see our action alert here and www.wixarika.org. The Wixárika traditional authorities' proclamation against mining in the Wirikuta Cultural and Ecological Reserves is posted here in English and here in Spanish.

Read more, see email action buttons….