Stephen Carmel is a world-class speaker with a truly compelling story to tell, and after learning about him from his appearance at the USNI/AFCEA Joint War Fighting Conference, we were deeply impressed.
Below we summarize the highlights from his speech, which we have put into a proper document with emphasis added throughout. This is one of the most useful intelligent commercial presentations to government we have every seen.
Highlights of his “prime” or most recent speech are below–although delivered in May, it did not hit critical mass in our circles until just now. Whatever “challenging tone” might be detected below is from Phi Beta Ioto–the speaker is a diplomat.
1) Complexity is the prime challenge. US Government is not trained, equipped, or organized to deal with complexity.
2) Global trade web has zero slack capacity and both the maritime and air webs depend in internal train and truck webs to keep going. US is $20 billion behind in the latter infrastructure.
3) Global trade web runs on computers and with the dependence on just in time inventory handling, has zero slack in the event of disruption, and the easiest as well as the most damaging disruptioin lies with computers and data that can be contaminated, manipulated, or simply destroyed.
4) USG completely missed China's deal with Russia to lock up the Siberian oil supply that is now bonded at the hip with the Chinese refining capacity that was part of the deal–this is a supply not subject to maritime interdiction.
