Category: Topics (All Other)

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Journal: Director of National Intelligence Reverses Progress–Time to Rethink Everything

Government, Methods & Process, Reform, Technologies, Tools

IC Meets OSINT
IC Meets OSINT

Shutdown Of Intelligence Community E-mail Network Sparks E-Rebellion

The Atlantic POLITICS

Marc Ambinder

Oct 6 2009

The intelligence community's innovative uGov e-mail domain, one of its earliest efforts at cross-agency collaboration, will be shut down because of security concerns, government officials said.  The decision, announced internally last Friday to the hundreds of analysts who use the system, drew immediate protests from intelligence agency employees and led to anxiety that other experimental collaborative platforms, like the popular Intellipedia website, are also in the target sights of managers.

It follows reports that another popular analytic platform called “Bridge,” which allows analysts with security clearances to collaborate with people outside the government who have relevant expertise but no clearances, is being killed, and indications that funding for another transformational capability, the DoDIIS Trusted Workstation, which allows analysts to look at information at a variety of clearance levels — Secret, Top Secret, Law Enforcement Sensitive– is being curtailed.
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Journal: Lee Hamilton on Congress

Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Reform
Lee Hamilton
Lee Hamilton

Overview

Is This The Congress We Want? We Can't Wait Much Longer To Fix Congress Lobbying Murkiness Undermines Our Trust in Congress Congress Confuses the Public and Itself Congressional Bickering Who Lobbies for the Rest of Us? It's Time for the Public to Fund Congressional Travel Congress Needs to Invigorate Its Ethics System, Not Weaken It Why Congress Must Learn To Look Ahead Broken Budget Process Congress and Individual Liberties A Balanced View of Congress The Money Chase Tackling the Tough Issues Is Congress out of Touch? Congress and the Pork Barrel

Phi Beta Iota: Lee Hamilton, a Representative for 30+ years, now leads The Center on Congress at Indiana University.  He is unique for being the single voice most responsible for putting an Open Source Agency (OSA) on pages 23 and 413 of the 9-11 Commission Report, something he did on the basis of what he learned from being on the Aspin-Brown Commission and watching the “The Burundi Exercise” that pitted Robert Steele with six open source telephone calls against the entire U.S. Intelligence Community.  Steele won, producing commercial imagery, Russian 1:50 combat charts, a list of the top academic experts; a list of the top journalists; tribal orders of battle including technical, etcetera.  CIA had a cute little map of the region and a regional economic study with flawed assumptions (mirroring).  Each of the above is a separate short discourse, each worthy of every citizen's attention.

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Reference: Russell Ackoff on Doing Right Things Righter

About the Idea, Alpha A-D, Articles & Chapters, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Historic Contributions, Reform
Russell L. Ackoff
Russell L. Ackoff

Phi Beta Iota: Government is broken.  Ron Paul has that exactly right.  It is broken for two reasons: first because over time those spending the money have grown distant from those providing the money, the individual taxpayers, AND from reality.  The second reason it is broken is because knowledge itself has become fragmented, and “systems thinking” has fallen by the wayside.

Below are three quotes from a tremendous reference of lasting value to every citizen and policymaker.

ONE: Reformations and transformations are not the same thing.  Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives.  Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.

cover ackoff paperTWO: The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. This is very significant because almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them righter.

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Journal: Afghanistan as Microcosm

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Policy, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

10 Steps To Victory In Afghanistan

Reform or Go Home (David Kilcullen)    End Suicide Attacks (Robert Pape)    If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join (Linda Robinson)    Pump Up the Police (Anthony Cordesman)    Kick Out Corruption (Nader Nadery)    Learn to Tax From the Taliban (Gretchen Peters)    Polls Have the Power (Merrill McPeak)    Take a Risk (Andrew McDonald Exum)    Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose (Frederick Kagan)    Pakistani Patronage (Paul Pillar)

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

4 Broad Strategies Weighed — From Pullout To Boosting Troop Level

Getting out   Scaling back

Staying put    Ramping up

Strategic Analytic Matrix

Integrated Analytics
Integrated Analytics

Phi Beta Iota: In the context of holistic strategy and integrated analytics as depicted by the two thumbnails (click on each to get to the larger graphic), we are stunned by the mediocrity and myopia of the “conventional wisdom.”  It's all connected.  Absent a coherent world view and strategic analytic model with integrity, this Administration is toast.  The Republic has no strategy, no mature threat construct, no Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS), and zero integrity in the sense of being honest about the totality of the substance of governance.

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Journal: Paul Rahe and Charles Gasparino on Obama’s Implosion

Government, Policies, Policy, Reform, Strategy

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Burned by Obama:Wall St. execs feel betrayed

By CHARLES GASPARINO,September 29, 2009

Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Paul Rahe: Obama's wrecking crew

September 30, 200

When I was working on my book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, I read a work that Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of The New Republic, published in 1937. In it, with an eye to the New Deal, he observed that, while

the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .

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Journal: The Demise of Strategy in the US Government

Strategy
Capstone Summary
Capstone Summary

Quite fortuitously, the Strategic Studies Institute has placed in the public domain a superb monograph by Justic Kelly and Mike Brennan on ALIEN: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy (september 2009).

It is a very good read, along with our summary of the failed 2008 Whole of Government conference that SSI sponsored, which followed the failed 1998 Strategy Revision conference–failed for not being heard.

We were all right then, we are still right now, but unless General James Jones, USMC gets himself a deputy that is grounded in strategy & integrity, this Administration is toast, in part because there is NO DIFFERENCE among the apparatchiks that trade places within the two-party system.  They ae ALL out of touch with strategy, and hence reality.

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Journal: China 8, USA 0

02 China, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Media Reports, Policies, Threats, Topics (All Other), Worth A Look
Full Op-Ed Online
Full Op-Ed Online
Phi Beta Iota: First, tip of the hat to the  New York Times for open persistent URLs.   Bravo! We strongly recommend a reading of the entire piece at the NYT website. Shame on the USA for not living up to the Founding Father's aspirations for a wise government and an engaged public.  No one now working for the White House can recite the ten high-level threats, the twelve core policies that must be harmonized, or the eight demographic challengers–including China–who we should be helping devise the World Brain with embedded EarthGame.  US voters are slow to anger, but that anger will rise in 2010 and crest in 2012.
Op-Ed Contributor:  Eight Idas Behind China's Success

By ZHANG WEI-WEI, Published: September 30, 2009

EXTRACT:  Critics of China like to claim that despite its economic success, the country has no “big ideas” to offer. But to this author, it is precisely big ideas that have shaped China’s dramatic rise. Here are eight such ideas:

1. Seeking truth from facts.

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