Winslow Wheeler: Don Vandergriff’s “The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs,” second edition

Major Don Vandergriff (USA, ret.) has released the second–expanded and updated–edition of his critical analysis of the Army’s officer corps, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs. The book explains why and how the Army’s leadership has simultaneously designed itself for bureaucratic success and leadership failure in battle.  It is …

Berto Jongman: Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports

Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras discusses how she has been repeatedly detained and questioned by federal agents whenever she enters the United States. Poitras said the interrogations began after she began working on her documentary, “My Country, My Country,” …

Stephen E. Arnold: Legacy Systems as an Information Priority

Another Information Priority: Legacy Systems Posted: 16 Aug 2013 05:29 AM PDT The hoohah about cloud computing, Big Data, and other “innovations” continues. Who needs Oracle when one has Hadoop? Why license SPSS or some other Fancy Dan analytics system when there are open choice analytics systems a mouse click away? Search? Lots of open …

Babette Bensoussan: Big Data Does Not Make Your Smarter [Nor Is It Necessarily Useful]

Mutters – Big Data Doesn’t Make You Smarter Have you heard ….. big data relies on a very big assumption: that having more data gives organisations better understanding of their environment.  The apostles of big data preach that it will make organisations smarter.  In fact, the opposite is true: big data dulls an organisation’s strategic senses. …

Berto Jongman: Forbes Pimps Palantir

How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes. EXTRACT Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In …

Patrick Meier: Can Official Disaster Response Apps Compete with Twitter?

Can Official Disaster Response Apps Compete with Twitter? There are over half-a-billion Twitter users, with an average of 135,000 new users signing up on a daily basis (1). Can emergency management and disaster response organizations win over some Twitter users by convincing them to use their apps in addition to Twitter? For example, will FEMA’s smartphone app gain …

Winslow Wheeler: Purge the Generals to Fix the Army + Flag Corruption and Ineptitude RECAP

There is a devastating review of the quality of Army leadership at the new issue of Armed Forces Journal.  At Armed Forces Journal, it is an article by Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (“Purge the Generals”), and it merits the attention of anyone following military affairs, I believe.  If you think Army leadership is an island of …