The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
SHORT-CUT: http://tinyurl.com/NATO-OSE
2015-2016
NATO Strategic Foresight Wrap-Up
NATO Innovation Hub Strategic Foresight Report
Answers: Steele for NATO Strategic Foresight
Berto Jongman: Will US Collapse Soon? Robert Steele: Should EU Be Thinking About Post-US NATO?
2013
2014 back to 2000 Below the Fold
Gen. Philip M. Breedlove is Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Commander, U.S. Air Forces Africa, Commander Air Component Command, Ramstein; and Director, Joint Air Power Competence Centre, Kalkar, Germany. He is responsible for Air Force activities, conducted through 3rd Air Force, in an area of operations covering more than 19 million square miles. This area includes 105 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, and possesses more than a quarter of the world's population and generates more than a quarter of the world's gross domestic product.
General Breedlove was raised in Forest Park, Ga., and was commissioned in 1977 as a distinguished graduate of Georgia Tech's ROTC program. He has been assigned to numerous operational, command and staff positions, and has completed nine overseas tours, including two remote tours. He has commanded a fighter squadron, an operations group, three fighter wings, and a numbered air force. Additionally, he has served as operations officer in the Pacific Command Division on the Joint Staff; executive officer to the Commander of Headquarters Air Combat Command; the senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.
Prior to assuming his current position, General Breedlove served Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. As Vice Chief, he presided over the Air Staff and served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Requirements Oversight Council and Deputy Advisory Working Group. He assisted the Chief of Staff with organizing, training, and equipping of 680,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. General Breedlove has flown combat missions in Operation Joint Forge/Joint Guardian. He is a command pilot with 3,500 flying hours, primarily in the F-16.
2013-03-28 NATO approves Breedlove's nomination as top commander
2013-03-28 Obama to nominate Air Force general for NATO post
This is a very big step from the past, when insurance companies charged premiums based on big data risk, but nothing was done on the front line — among the fire fighters – because they did not have the same access to such tool. Another excellent useful story from BBC.
DOD INSPECTOR GENERAL HAS UNRESTRICTED ACCESS TO CLASSIFIED INFO
A Department of Defense instruction issued on Friday reinforces the policy that the DoD Office of Inspector General (OIG) is to have full access to all records, including classified records, that it needs to perform its function, and that no DoD official other than the Secretary himself may block such access.
“The OIG must have expeditious and unrestricted access to all records…, regardless of classification, medium (e.g. paper, electronic) or format (e.g., digitized images, data) and information available to or within any DoD Component, and be able to obtain copies of all records and information as required for its official use once appropriate security clearances and access are substantiated for the OIG DoD personnel involved,” the instruction states. See “Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense Access to Records and Information,” DoD Instruction 7050.03, March 22, 2013.
By stressing that the Inspector General's access is independent of a record's classification, medium or format, this language elaborates and bolsters the text of a previous version of the instruction, which did not make those distinctions.
Furthermore, the new instruction specifies, “No officer, employee, contractor, or Service member of any DoD Component may deny the OIG DoD access to records.” Only the Secretary of Defense may invoke a statutory exemption to limit IG access to certain intelligence, counterintelligence, or other sensitive matters, which he must then justify in a report to Congress.
As a result these robust access provisions, the DoD Inspector General is well-positioned to conduct internal oversight not only of the Pentagon's extensive classified programs, but also of the classification system itself, particularly since the Department of Defense is the most prolific classifier in the U.S. government.
In fact, the Inspector General of each executive branch agency that classifies national security information is now required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to evaluate the agency's classification program. Each Inspector General was directed “to identify policies, procedures, rules, regulations, or management practices that may be contributing to persistent misclassification of material.”
The first evaluation is due to be completed by September 30, 2013. Vexingly, the Act did not provide a functional definition of “over-classification” or “misclassification.” Therefore, the first hurdle that the IG evaluations must overcome is to determine the nature and the parameters of the problem of over-classification.
TODAY's INTERVIEW: Elena Panaritis on Cyprus
Elena Panaritis is an institutional economist, property rights expert, and social entrepreneur. In more than a decade as an economist at the World Bank, Panaritis spearheaded several institutional reforms, particularly property rights reform in Peru. Her book Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust
Singapore’s Lessons for an Unequal America
New York Times, 18 March 2013
Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany. Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member.
Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8.
EXTRACTS
Mutters – How good is your strategy?
Have you heard ….. if you want a decent strategy, you need a firm grasp of reality, which means avoiding bad strategies. How do you define bad strategies? According to Richard Rumelt, author of “Good Strategy Bad Strategy“, they are characterised by one or more of the following factors:
Make the above factors part of your strategic reviews and you may avoid some of the prevalent pitfalls!
Adapted from: “What strategy isn't”, Mike Riddiford, Editor, CEO Forum http://www.ceoforum.com.
