(1) See particularly page 5; (2) Mr. Baer, perhaps a somewhat controversial CIA retiree, may have more credibility than Matthews' husband gives him credit for with respect to knowing what women can and cannot do operationally. According to the book “The Company We Keep,” which Baer co-authored with his wife, his wife Dayna was a CIA security officer who served overseas in some challenging circumstances; (3) I know a female with traits similar to those ascribed to Matthews.)
“The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it,” Anderson said. “I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn’t vetted.” And the mother of his three children is dead because of it.
Phi Beta Iota: Bauer has it right–this is not about “girls” being inept, it is about “analysts” being inept at command in the field, especially in a paramilitary environment. CIA is a bureaucracy and most if not all of its managers are so out of touch with reality as to be a danger to the current director and the agency as a whole. 90% of the Human Intelligence (HUMINT) that CIA produces is from foreign liaison hand-outs and domestic overt collection by the domestic division from legal travelers.
Five press articles follow. First four describe efforts DoD and Army senior leaders to paint force reductions as good and necessary things. If you believe that reducing DoD is keystone to saving Nation, some of what leaders are saying possibly sounds plausible. As a private citizen, I don't believe that White House, Congress, or DoD have done right thing so I don't subscribe to what is being said in support of it. I'm glad my job does not, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's and Chief of Staff, Army's do, require that I give public statements supporting this stuff. Wonder how they sleep at night…
Fifth article, by SmallWarsJournal.com, presents probably best summary of impacts of DoD's actions I have seen. They seem to endorse necessity of DoD's actions, so I disagree there.
Phi Beta Iota: 4% of the force (the infantry) take 80% of the casualties and cost 1% of the total military budget. In this context, the only winners are members of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.
After the world economy crashes there's bound to be a lot of cvil unrest. Obviously the internet can be used to organize civil unrest, which will make authorities want to control it, perhaps even eliminate it.
But after the crash, the most pressing problem will be organizing the basic necessities of life, like water, food, shelter, clothing, energy for power, and a means of exchanging all these things.
After the global economy crashes, the system of organization that once provided us with the necessities of life—the global aggregate of national economies—will be at a standstill. But the internet will be available, at least in the beginning, to replace it. Even so, it will take a while before it becomes an efficient replacement.
If citizens become more interested in organizing unrest than they are in organizing the basic necessities of life, then authorities will see the internet as a threat. So if citizens want to keep the internet after the crash, they better immediately start using it for organizing the basic necessities of life rather than organizing unrest and they better start creating what some call the Autonomous Internet. Otherwise the one system that might save them will be under attack from the government. And I doubt humankind can survive being thrown back into the stone age like that during an economic collapse that will be unprecedented in every respect and along every dimension.
Phi Beta Iota: Delusional fluff. The good news is that most of the stuff that is vulnerable to single point of failure interruptions is not all that important if you have a proper strategy that is based on reality and true cost information. What they do not get is the urgent need to create jobs that are directly related to resilience and sustainability from the local level up.
While press attention on developments in Russia focused on the disputed parliamentary elections and the following protests, which seemed to revive political activism in Moscow and other urban centers, there have been some military developments that deserve some attention. One such theme is an old topic, sixth generation warfare and its impact upon the nuclear threshold – do advanced conventional systems, which approach nuclear effects, blur the line on nuclear deterrence? The Russian press has had several recent articles that suggest this issue is becoming more acute.
In the aftermath of Desert Storm in 1991, the late Major-General Vladimir Slipchenko coined the phrase “sixth generation warfare” to refer to the “informatization” of conventional warfare and the development of precision strike systems which could make the massing of forces in the conventional sense an invitation to disaster and demand the development of the means to mass effects through depth to fight systems versus systems warfare. Slipchenko looked back at Ogarkov’s “revolution in military affairs” with “weapons based on new physical principles” and saw “Desert Storm” as a first indication of the appearance of such capabilities. He did not believe that sixth generation warfare had yet manifested its full implications (Vladimir Slipchenko, Voina budushchego. Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1999).
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However, Slipchenko did believe that sixth generation warfare would replace fifth generation warfare, which he identified as thermonuclear war, and had evolved into a strategic stalemate, making nuclear first use an inevitable road to destruction (from the end of the Soviet Union until his death in 2005, he had analyzed combat experience abroad to further refine his conception until he began to speak of the emergence of “no-contact warfare” as the optimal form for sixth generation warfare; Vladimir Slipchenko, Beskontaktnye voiny. Moscow: Izdatel’skii dom: Gran-Press,” 2001). In his final volume, Slipchenko redefined sixth generation warfare as involving the capacity to conduct distant, no-contact operations and suggested that such conflict would demand major military reforms. Slipchenko made a compelling case for the enhanced role of C4ISR in conducting such operations (Vladimir Slipchenko,Voina novogo pokoleniia: Distantsionnye i beskontaktaktnye, Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2004).
Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders who worry that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. Report also analyses the top 10 risks in five categories – economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.
Phi Beta Iota: The report fails to address the absence of both intelligence and integrity among all “institutions” be they public or private. This is the entire point of the global Occupy movement. This is also the entire point of this website, which predates Occupy by some time.
Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers.
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Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.
Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?
Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
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Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.
Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.
Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.
Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: System D is completely separate from straight forward black crime (organized crime) or white crime (Goldman Sachs et al). What this really means is that governments have lost all legitimacy and two thirds of the global economy now considers governments to be at best a meddling (and costly) nuisance and at worst the enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. Governments brought this on themselves.
