1. Continuous learning
2. Educational leap-frogging
3. A new crop of older life-long learners and educators
4. Breaking gender boundaries, reducing physical burdens
5. A new literacy emerges: software literacy
6. Education's long tail
7. Teachers and pupils trade roles
8. Synergies with mobile banking and mobile health initiatives
9. New opportunities for tradtional educational institutions
10. A revolution leading to customized education
Phi Beta Iota: Entire article strongly recommended. We would have added “just enough, just in time learning” but find the over-all list compelling.
Summary: Today GI Wilson writes about the great game of the 21st century — the US government vs. our 4GW foes. Once called “low intensity war”, our foes have taught us the ability of sustained 4GW produces only a series of expensive defeats for foreign armies (no matter how powerful). A slow bleeding, until we either adapt or give up.
The recent article, “7 Absurd Ways the Military Wastes Taxpayer Dollars” by Laura Gottesdiene at Salon shines a bright light on military waste and the smarmy behavior of general officers. This smarmy behavior is just the tip of a national security iceberg. The personal foibles of these general officers are symptoms of a much deeper problem. In the wake of 9-11 we are witnessing the costly ineffectiveness our Titanic government bureaucracies. Today, a report by the Independent Accountability Review Board on Benghazi slammed senior level leadership and management laying bare national security miscalculations and incompetence. (Chicago Tribune)
What our national security apparatchiks are missing is that we live in a world where we are seeing sub-national “bad actors” use 4th generation warfare (4GW), which embodies low-tech tactics, techniques procedures (TTPs) together with insurrection, sabotage, espionage, and terrorism, to subvert nation-states. In effect, 4GW has emerged to challenge the established international system. While 4GW is not new, as some critics would have you believe, 4GW has emerged over several decades as the dominant style of warfare in the first part of the 21st Century.
The United States Government (USG) has not adapted to this change. Driven by conventional mentality and bureaucratic inertia, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) and the US military has responded to the 4th generation warfare (4GW) threats with a conventional techno strategy of fielding high cost acquisition programs that created the MICC in the first place during the Cold War. The acquisition-programmatic approach to strategy led to a welter of highly complex programs and associated complex organizational relationships that force-fits the fighting man into a technological strait-jacket.
Phi Beta Iota: No holds the US Government accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors — including being terribly irresponsible about everything that the government is supposed to be doing in the public interest. There is absolutely no question about the urgency of cutting the Pentagon budget in half (as well as reducing by at least 50% the number of flag officers and senior executives), but at the same time, we need intelligence with integrity in order to create a 450-ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, and an air-liftable Army that would allow us, over ten years, to close most of our military bases overseas and bring our troops — and their purchasing power — home. One initiative we have put forward is that of the Open Source Agency (OSA). Another that we have alluded to but never been explicit about has to do with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Imagine the President establishing the OSA as a Whole of Government decision-support capabilities (with Congressional jurisdictions getting the same Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that their Executive agencies are receiving) AND appointing a kick-ass Deputy Director for Management of OMB, with the authority to slash and burn up to 15% a year of any agencies budget, with an additional 10% subject to Presidential concurrence on the specifics. Now THAT is transformational.
In truth, the public may well just be sick of hearing stories about “lone gunmen.” Of all possible horrors, this one, even more than the Benghazi killings, is loaded with political implication, not just “gun control,” but a clear attack on the security of every American family.
Today, Michael Harris, former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona and GOP campaign finance chairman, in an internationally televised news broadcast, cited “Israeli revenge” in, what he called, “the terrorist attack in Connecticut.”
Harris cited Israeli “rage” against the US and against President Barack Obama. By “Israel,” we mean “Netanyahu.”
The mission was to teach America a lesson, knowing that “America would take the punishment, keep “quiet,” and let a ‘fall guy’ take the blame.”
Phi Beta Iota:We have no direct knowledge but agree that there is no way an autistic kid did this and then made the rifle disappear after he was suicided. Who exactly (no fewer than two others and probably three) remains to be established. With regard to Michael Harris' assertions, we would only observe that anyone who doubts the venality of Zionists (not the average Jew) need look no further than the USS Liberty. The murderous attack by Israeli forces in unmarked aircraft and patrol boats killed 34 and wounded 171 US sailors. It was covered up by order of the President at the time, and that cover-up maintained for years there-after, threatening the families of those killed and wounded by Israel with loss of benefits and pensions if they talked. We tend to doubt the Israeli connection, but we will never, ever, forget the USS Liberty as the defining perfidy in Israel's view of the USA as a shiksa that does not count.
Citation: Robert David STEELE Vivas, “The Human Factor & The Human Environment: Contextual Trust for Sources & Methods,” Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (20 December 2012).
This is Part II in a developing conversation highly pertinent to NATO and Allied Command Transformation (ACT).
Robert,
I got that you believe in an intelligence community that is up to the challenge of providing full knowledge and understanding of the environment in support of decision making. This is also my preferred solution. However, I have another human environment issue to solve. The ultimate goal is to influence or shape the human environment. In many cases this implies building trust with people. The problem is that when you approach people with an information collection mindset, you ruin the trust. And when you come with a trust mindset, you don´t get as much information. So, for the sake of trust building, the intelligence community should not be free to interact at will with the people. Could it still do its job under this condition?
The EastWest Institute released Building Trust in Cyberspace, a report featuring highlights of its 3rd Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit held in New Delhi on October 30-31, 2012. More than 300 participants from 22 countries heard from cyber experts from across the globe representing both the private and public sectors.
I went to a conference that made me rethink everything that I have ever written, said and advocated about the Internet. I had a visceral, emotional reaction to the information presented at the International Youth and Technology Forum on Digital Citizenship, April Rudin – CEO The Rudin Group, The Huffington Post, April 21 2011
I am ambivalent about whether Chuck Hagel has the managerial and bureaucratic skills to make the kind of Sec of Defense we need to clean out the Pentagon's Augean Stables — but the outrageous neocon assault on him because he does not kowtow to the Likud party line is over the top, as Steven Walt explains below.
