Public Intelligence Blog – Page 4049 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2005/06/282009/12/04

Review: Radical Evolution–The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human (Hardcover)

4 Star, Future, Information Society, Information Technology, Science & Politics of Science

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Genetics, Robotics, Information, Nano–Lacks Humanity,

June 28, 2005

Joel Garreau

I've admired Joel Garreau ever since I read and reviewed his really insightful The Nine Nations of North America. I am glad to have bought and read this book, it is certainly worth reading, but it is somewhat unbalanced. However (this is an edit of the original review), now that I have read Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology a techno-geek rendition of the same technologies and their future, I have to give Garreau higher marks–while this book may lack soul, it does come closer to its titular objective than does Kurzweil's. Both are worth buying and reading together.

He focused on four technologies abbeviated as GRIN: Genetics, Robotics, Information, and Nano. Others have focused on the integration of Nano, Information, Bio-Technology and Cognitive Science (NIBC), and I would have been happier with this book if it focused more on the thinking side of the future rather than the bio-mechanical side.

The other area where I felt the book was disappointing was in its almost total acceptance at face value of all that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is doing to elevate soldier-humans, giving them super human strength, acute mental perception almost to the point of telepathy, and so on. I could not help but feel, over and over as I read this book, that if DARPA were to apply its considerable talents to waging peace and addressing poverty, disease, water scarcity, energy independence, and the urgent need for global education that does not require packing kids like rats into a stiffling anti-creative environment (and making them get up at 0600), that we would all be better off.

The author talks about the implications for human transformation in all of this, but missing from his schema is the moral dimension. This is closer to a comic book super-hero depiction than it is to a renaissance man's moral and cultural enlightenment, and that, in my view, is where this book falls short–it lacks soul.

I recommend that readers consider the books by Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All and Margaret Wheatley Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World as well as the book The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter to gain an alternative perspective on what it might mean to be human in the future, despite the over-whelming incursions of technology into our humanity.

2005/06/282009/12/04

Review: Squandered Victory–The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Hardcover)

4 Star, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Iraq, Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power

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Somewhat tedious, speaks truth, reveals our shortfalls,

June 28, 2005

Larry Diamond

The bottom line is this book is on page 290: “We never listened to the Iraqi people, or to the figures in the country that they respected.”

While some reviewers are critical of this author for representing all that is wrong with our post-war approach (he doesn't speak Arabic and knows nothing of the Middle East) I do not hold that against him–he tried to help, and he was the best we had. It is the fault of a long series of US Administrations, and multiple generations of Congress, that have chosen to ignore the real world and to short-change American education to the point that we are literally clueless as a Nation about the real world and how billions of people in the real world hold mixed feelings about America: admiring much of what we represent, while despising our immoral corporate and unilateral government behavior.

The U.S. Army, both before the war and in the post-reconstruction period–and the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army–come out of this book looking very professional. The Army got it right, both in its pre-war estimates of what would be needed, and in its post-war recommendations. The author places the blame for the post-war deaths and disasters squarely at the feet of a naive President that empowered a Secretary of Defense inclined to go light, and side-lined a Department of State whose own intelligence estimates on Iraq have been consistently superior to those of either the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Defense.

I put this book down with a heavy heart, coincident with Secretary Rumsfeld announcing that we will be in Iraq and be taking losses for another twelve years. The good news is that Iraq will over time achieve its own balance, its own form of democracy. The bad news is that, as Winston Churchill has said so famously, “The Americans always do the right thing–they just do it last (after making every other possible mistake).”

2005/06/262009/08/06

2005 Simmons (US) Puts Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) into Intelligence Reform Legislation

Government, Historic Contributions

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Representative Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) Obtains 417 House Votes In Favor of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) as Essential Part of Reform Effort

WASHINGTON, June 26 /PRNewswire/ — According to Robert David Steele Vivas, CEO of OSS.Net, Inc., a global commercial intelligence corporation, “Representative Rob Simmons is going to be a vital contributor to Congressional deliberations on reform of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” The House of Representatives passed by a vote of 417 to 1 his amendment to bolster our national security and strengthen our nation's intelligence capabilities. The Simmons amendment directs the Director of Central Intelligence to focus on the importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and report to Congress in six months on the progress being made in using this under-utilized intelligence discipline. The lawmaker's amendment was incorporated into H.R. 4548, the “Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005,” which passed the House by a vote of 360-61. According to Steele, “The Simmons amendment enables a conference discussion on OSINT, and makes possible the establishment of a national OSINT program as part of the final legislation. We who have advocated OSINT reform since 1988 are explicitly seeking $125 million per year for an independent field activity of the Department of Defense, with $10 million per year multinational OSINT collection centers in each theater of operations.”

“The ‘information explosion' has dramatically increased both the quality and quantity of the information available in the public sector,” Simmons said. “Because this information is unclassified, it can be shared quickly and freely, and acted upon. Unfortunately, our country's intelligence service has under-utilized OSINT. The time has come to revisit the importance of Open Source Intelligence. It not only saves time and money, it saves lives.”

ABOUT CONGRESSMAN ROB SIMMONS: Congressman Rob Simmons served 37 years in the U.S. Army, starting as a Private and retiring in 2003 as a Colonel. He earned two Bronze Star Medals for his service in Vietnam. He is one of only two Members of Congress with clandestine experience, serving ten years in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. He worked with Senator Barry Goldwater and with Bill Casey from 1981-1985, while Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. His press representative is Meghan Curran, who can be reached at (202) 225-2076.

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: Three Billion New Capitalists–The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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Strategic, Economic Fundamentals, Compelling, Cannot Ignore,

June 25, 2005

Clyde Prestowitz

Before writing this review, I reflected carefully on the thoughts of those who say that the author, who is known to me, was wrong about Japan, that he emphasizes the best points of the new competitors (China and India) while neglecting our best points. There is certainly something to what they say, but as one who studies the entire world for our US Government clients, with a special familiarity with Chinese operations in Africa and South America, and a business familiarity with what is happening in India, I have to say that on balance, the author is more correct his critics will admit, and this is a book that we simply cannot ignore.

His most important point is made in one line: America does not have a strategy. America does not have a strategy for winning the global war on terror, it does not have an energy strategy, it does not have an education strategy, it does not have an economic or competitiveness strategy. The government is being run on assertion and ideology rather than evidence and thought–a media cartoon has captured the situation perfectly: as the VP tells the President that we are “turning the corner” the two walls behind them are labeled Incompetence and Fantasy. As a moderate Republican and a trained intelligence professional with two books on the latter topic, I have to say that this book by this author, a Reaganite businessman and senior appointee in the Department of Commerce is right on target. We *are* out of touch with reality, and we do not appreciate, at any level from White House to School House, the tsunami that is about to hit us.

The author makes two important points early on in the books: first, that information is the currency of this age, replacing money, labor, and physical resources; and second, that the best innovation comes from the right mix of sound education across the board, heavy investment in research & development, and a co-located manufacturing bases that can tinker with R&D and have a back and forth effect. America lacks all three of the latter, and is not yet serious about investing in global coverage of all languages, 24/7.

There is a great deal of commonality between this book and Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century both written and published in the same time frame. Both authors agree that the Internet has put an end to time and space constraints, and both agree that American labor is very much at risk because our basic education is flawed and we have no strategy for demanding continuing education from employers. The author excels at drawing the connection between poor education, “it's been twenty years since anyone at Bell Labs received a Nobel Prize,” and the massive increase in outsourcing of knowledge work, not just scut work.

I do have to say, having called Friedman's latest book a massive Op-Ed in my review of that book, that this author is more thoughtful, provides more historical context, and delves into more basic important detail that Friedman–put bluntly, his book is more serious and more valuable than Friedman's, as in this is the meat, where Friedman is the sauce. Prestowitz addresses the core issues of the value of the dollar, the central place of energy, the role of demographics, and the fundamental macro-economic and structural imbalances that will weaken America, that are weakening America, over the passage to of a century of time–this is not a “snap-shot,” this is a *deep* look into the soul of America.

Chapter 12, the author's recommendations, is alone worth the price of the book and should be required reading in every comparative economics and national security policy classroom. I won't list these recommendations but will highlight just a couple that struck me as immediately actionable: declaration of energy independence; DoD as a catalyst for socio-economic recovery by taking the lead in energy, education, and intelligence, learning how to wage peace; end to subsidies (the author uncharacteristically fails to note that we can increase government revenues by $500B a year if we not only eliminate subsidies, but stop import-export tax fraud and demand that corporations pay taxes on the profits they declare to their shareholders rather than the falsified and manipulated balance sheets they present to the IRS); join Japan and India to NAFTA–this is an outrageously brilliant idea.

Clyde Prestowitz is one of the most insightful, balanced, *sane* voices on national competitiveness today. He would make an excellent Secretary of Commerce in the transpartisan Administration.

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: The Wealth of Knowledge–Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organisation (Hardcover)

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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One of three best books on creating value in the InfoAge,

June 25, 2005

Thomas A. Stewart

EDIT of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

Too many people will miss the core message of this book, which is about paying attention to truth and seeking out truth in the context of networks of trust, rather than about managing the process of internal knowledge.

When the author says “It's time to gather the grain and torch the chaff,” his book over-all tells me he is talking about brain-power and a culture of thinking (the grain) and counterproductive information technology and irrelevant financial audits (the chaff).

This is one of those rare books that is not easily summarized and really needs to be read in its entirely. A few items that jumped out at me:

1) Training is a priority and has both return on investment and retention of employee benefits that have been under-estimated.

2) All major organizations (he focused on business, I would certainly add government bureaucracies) have “legal underpinnings, ..systems of governance, ..management disciplines, ..accounting (that) are based on a model of the corporation that has become irrelevant.”

3) Although one reviewer objected to his comments on taxation, the author has a deeper point–the government is failing to steer the knowledge economy because it is still taxing as if we had an industrial economy–this has very severe negative effects.

4) As I read the author's discussion of four trends he credits to John Hagel of I2, it was clear that “intelligence” needs to be applied not only to single organizations, but to entire industries. In my view, this author is quite brilliant and needs to be carefully cultivated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all of the industry associations, and by governments. There are some extremely powerful “macro” opportunities here that his ideas could make very profitable for a group acting in the aggregate.

5) This is one book that should have had footnotes instead of end-notes, for while the author is careful to credit all ideas borrowed from others, it is difficult in the text to follow his thinking in isolation. One idea that is very pertinent to national intelligence and counterintelligence as well as corporate knowledge management is that of the reversal of the value chain–“first sell, then make,” i.e. stop pushing pre-conceived products out the door and get into the business of just enough, just in time knowledge or product creation that is precisely tailored to the real time needs of the client.

6) The author excells at blasting those corporations (and implicitly, major government bureaucracies such as the spy agencies that spend over $30 billion a year of taxpayer funds) that assume that if they only apply more dollars to the problem, they can solve any challenge. “Too often ‘dumb power' produces a higher-level stalemate.” One could add: and at greater cost!

7) The bottom line of this truly inspired and original book comes in the concluding chapters when the author very ably discusses how it is not knowledge per se that creates the value, but rather the leadership, the culture, and infrastructure (one infers a networked infrastructure, not a hard-wired bunker). These are the essential ingredients for fostering both knowledge creation and knowledge sharing, something neither the CIA nor the FBI understood at the management level in the years prior to 9-11.

Final note: I missed the pre-cursor to this book, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (1997) and just read it. I recommend both books, and in some ways, it is better to read this book first. I also recommend Robert Buckman's Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization, and the book, The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth as ideal companions to this path-finding work.

Recently published (2006 and on), see also, with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: Intellectual Capital–The New Wealth of Organizations (Paperback)

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial)

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Ref A for Buidling Value in the Information Age,

June 25, 2005

Thomas A. Stewart

I read the same author's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization first, and then went back to get this earlier book (1998), and I actually feel that reading them in that order is better. This book has a lot of detail that is well served by the context that can be found in the later book.

For those who really wish to get a deep look at the future of building value in the age of distribution information in all languages, I recommend that both of Stewart's books be read in conjunction with the following three Nobel-level books: Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Robert Buckman, Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and Christensen & Raynor, The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) My reviews of these books are both evaluative and summative, and could be helpful as short-cut, but they are no substitute for actually buying and reading the books.

The most important point in this book is that the value is no longer found in collecting just in case knowledge, but rather in connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and (the highest value) people to people. It's about connecting, not collecting. Based on this book I drew my own value triangle, VALUE appearing in the middle of the triangle, with Context being the lower left corer, Content being the lower right corner, and CONNECTION being the apex of the triangle–further refined as connecting customers, connecting contributing talents, and connecting sub-contracted sources, softwares, and services. No one is doing this today in the manner that meets the emerging needs of the marketplace.

Most interesting to me is the author's early emphasis on the Chief Financial Officer being the point of sale, not the CEO, the CTO, or the production divisions. Intellectual capital is a value-creation and profit-building exercise, and it needs to be presented as a financial campaign plan, not a technology plan, not a human resources plan, and not a sales and marketing plan.

Although the author focuses on intellectual property, and provides compelling anecdotes and links that suggest that any company in the knowledge business can increase its bottom line earnings by 20-40% if it does a better job of managing its intellectual property, I see two other emerging marketplaces in this book that the author may not have intended but certainly contributes insights to: managing shared access to external sources, to reduce the cost and increase the knowledge that companies can use to increase their competence in a global environment; and managing customer understanding and relationships in the aggregate–it is possible to take cross-selling to new heights if companies in different industries that are not competing with one another, will share customer information in new ways, thus leading to the invention of new3 offerings and new value.

A major point in this book that I believe everyone misses is that the management of intellectual property, or knowledge management, or external open source information acquisition and exploitation, is totally and utterly without value in the absence of a strategy. Collection or connecting is of the greatest value when it is done with strategic purpose, operational efficiency, and tactical effect.

There is a lot more in this book that will impact on my strategic business planning, and that I choose to not summarize here, but will instead end with three points the author makes that I consider to be important:

1) In the information age, only investments in knowledge building are really investments–traditional investments in capital goods are costs, not to be confused with investments intended to generate new value.

2) Knowledge value grows on a logarithmic scale, while goods value grows arithmetically.

3) In today's environment, careers are defined by personal skills and networking, not traditional jobs and corporate positions. The corollary of this is that individuals must self-manage their continuing education and skill acquisition, and any job that fails to provide for continuing upgrading of skills is not worth keeping.

I consider this a seminal reference.

2005/06/132009/12/04

Review: First In–An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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Superb First Person Account, Lacks Context & Avoids History,

June 13, 2005

Gary Schroen

EDIT of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

This is a superb first-person account. I have absolute and total respect for this officer, his team, his courage, and what he accomplished within weeks of 9-11, setting the stage for a new form of warfare in which CIA opened the door, Special Forces turned on the lights, and conventional Air Force leveled the place.

The book provides some extremely useful insights from the field with respect to Washington's failure to understand local politics and ground truth despite frequent detailed field appraisals from the Chief of Station, and the book makes it clear that Pakistan lobbied Washington strategically and ably to “sell” its plan for taking over Afghanistan with its own allies, against both Russian and US (and for that matter, Chinese) best interests.

There are five substantive military insights in this book:

1) Despite their enormous personal courage and high level of training, the US military special forces are handicapped by a joint defense-level policy that will not do deep bombing unless a Search & Rescue (SAR) capability is readily available. I recall the original Office of Strategic Services dropping people behind enemy lines (the pilots understood they might be shot down as part of the deal) and I just think to myself, shame on DoD, this force protection zero tolerance for casualties has gone too far. We need a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs with the balls to change the military culture back to one that is mission oriented rather than casualty averse.

2) Partly as a result of Pakistani influence [the author notes that the Pakistanis co-opted the CIA Station in Pakistan, not just the State Department and NSC in Washington] and point one above, the targeting authorities (CENTCOM and the Air Force) were very slow to act professionally on the targets identified by the Northern Alliance and the CIA field teams. I was enormously impressed by the GPS field surveys that the CIA team carried out, and under-whelmed by the Air Force focus on warehouses near Kabul rather than specified armed forces blocking the Northern Alliance path toward Kabul. I also noted in the margin, having some experience with provincial and tribal intelligence, that the US decision system is still too focused on state to state Ambassadorial level negotiations, and largely ignorant of and uninterested in the nuances of sub-state tribal views and concerns. That needs urgent fixing.

3) The Special Forces, despite their reputation for fearless operations behind enemy lines, were led by officers who insisted that they wear their proper military uniforms and shave every day. I have met the two-star general that gave and then enforced this order, and consider him a superb–absolutely top-notch–officer in terms of military skills, but the man is so culturally clueless as to give new meaning to the term oblivious. As a side note, thinking back to Steve McQueen in the great escape, it occurred to me that we need to establish a protocol under the Geneva Convention in which military personnel and overt intelligence personnel can blend into the local population to avoid cultural dissonance, but wear a small patch, clearly visible to those they see face to face–something like a SOF spear, with miniature rank on one side and miniature service seal on the other side, all within a two-inch wide circle.

4) PAVE LOW missed the Landing Zone (LZ) during the first and most critical Special Operations team insertion. Now, this could have happened if CIA provided the military with the wrong coordinates (or used Russian coordinates while the Americans were on another system), but this should never have happened. It also points out that the military and CIA evidently did not have the ability to talk to each other tactically on the final approach, which reminds me of our Marines not being able to talk to the US Embassy in Somalia as they completed their 400 nautical mile run just in time to stop the people from over-running the place. How is it that something as critical as masked inter-agency tactical communications can still not be achieved? INTER-4 Tacticomps with S-MINDS and CISCO AONS for all hands ASAP.

5) Air Force blew the first food-drop, dropping the packets from 27,000 feet without parachutes. What this made clear to me is that we have a peacetime Air Force (see my review of “Rules of the Game” by Andrew Gordon) that has forgotten how to do nuanced missions, especially those requiring that they do something other than deliver cargo conventionally or drop bombs.

The author ends the book more or less on page 363, where he suggests that a combined CIA and SOF campaign circling Waziristan, is needed. While he underestimates the denied area aspect of this zone, I agree that the Pakistanis are playing the Americans for fools, and I agree that there should be no area of the world where US forces cannot operate if they must.

The author loses one star, with some understanding, for failing to provide context and failing to acknowledge that his heroic mission was required because CIA did not take Afghanistan seriously before and after Charlie Wilson. Three other books, at least, must be read to understand this:

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB

The compansion to this book is Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander

I had a chance to talk to a CENTCOM officer informally about all this, and welcomed his observation that CIA does not always have the facts when it comes to their perception of military “mistakes.” We also talked about the need for a new approach to global intelligence. It is crystal clear to me that we need to have CIA/SOF bases all over the world that are under non-official cover and that work every major tribe and province. For every province, including especially provinces in denied areas, there must be at least one SOF-qualified sleeper able to receive a clandestine arrival, or provide the first stop for a SAR exit.

I'm glad they made it back-this was true grit and deep honor in action.