The Importance of Legitimacy -- A Lesson From History

From Kissinger's book, Diplomacy:

“Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.”

From Universality to Equilibrium
“Of course, in the end a balance of power always comes about de facto when several states interact.”

“Equilibrium works best if it is buttressed by an agreement on common values. The balance of power inhibits the capacity to overthrow the international order; agreement on shared values inhibits the desire to overthrow the international order. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty posturing.”

The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia
“There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony. The balance of power reduces the opportunities for using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force. An international order which is not considered just will be challenged sooner or later. But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical foreign-policy issues. For that reason, compatibility between domestic institutions is a reinforcement for peace.”

“In Great Britain’s concept of world order, the test of the balance of power was how well the various nations could perform the roles assigned to them in the overall design…In implementing this approach, Great Britain faced with respect to the Continental countries the same difference in perspective that the United States encountered during the Cold War. For nations simply do not define their purpose as cogs in a security system. Security makes their existence possible; it is never their sole or even principal purpose.”

“Historically, Germany has been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.”

“In dealing with the defeated enemy, the victors designing a peace settlement must navigate the transition from the intransigence vital to victory to the conciliaton needed to achieve a lasting peace. A punitive peace mortgages the international order because it saddles the victors, drained by their wartime exertions, with the task of holding down a country determined to undermine the settlement. Any country with a grievance is assured of finding nearly automatic support from the disaffected defeated party. This would be the bane of the Treaty of Versailles.”

Legitimacy tempers power-politics. After the Congress of Vienna, legitimacy helped to ensure the balance of power. A strength of Bush's democracy agenda is to bring the constraining issue of legitimacy into the forefront, but this time rest it on the legitimacy of a government vis-à-vis its people. Because it is the people who will feel the ill-effects of a government's foreign adventures and domestic policies, granting power to the people creates a great incentive for a government not to rock the boat to any great extent.

Random question on Islamophobia: at what point is it rational to fear group ‘x’? At what point is it useful? Are those two points the same?

And Not A Drop To Drink

"How deep is time?", asks a character in Don DeLillo's 1997 tome-of-the-age UNDERWORLD. The cover of the novel frames an eerie photograph of the World Trade Center towers from a dark and prophetic distance, across an expanse of garbage. And now one year has passed since the soul of another of the world's great and mysterious cities was asking the question in alternate terms, with suddenly deadly and serious stakes. How deep?, indeed. The water rose and rose, the world watched as the Yacht Club was swallowed in flames, an irony deficiency once again - much as in the wake of 9/11 - gripped every pair of eyes and ears as America's poor were suddenly, miraculously visible; and a woman who shares my genes was imminently pregnant in Touro Hospital as my mother and I helplessly waited for news of her very fate. It seemed that the public conversation would evolve to what the conditions of creation native to American poverty truly are. It seemed that James Agee and Walker Evans were actually onto something when they set out to document Southern tenant farmers years before Hitler would poison the century. The conversation, it turned out, was not to be; rather, a nation more concerned with the emotional stability of Jennifer Anniston and the auto-tuned vocal prospects of Paris Hilton reigned supreme. The poor remained. The poor remain.

And what of New New Orleans? Does walking down Pirate's Alley still resonate with the ghosts of a devil-may-care Bill Faulkner? Has Walker Percy's Kierkegaardian notion of what realitizes human beings - what makes us all present to each other - been proven true, the question of whether total catastrophe is the only possibility that we as a species retain for compassionate and outward-seeking perception? Do we waste time with politicizing our gestural futility? I believe during this week our duty is simple and necessary. We privatize New Orleans, its mythos and wonder and ancient sadnesses. We change the meanings and senses of words like "privatize" and "industry."

My private New Orleans - the city where my sister and brother-in-law and nephew live, the nightscape that has captivated me from my first chocolate milk shake at Camelia Grill to the arthritic dread in the pit of my stomach that invariably overwhelmed me whenever I flew out of a city that seems to welcome doom with an open heart, a city that can and must digest that doom and continue to inspire the secret poets of the shadows and the silent impressionists who sleep alone on wooden floors in the Quarter - can never drown. We must all privatize this special place, make room in the inner spaces within us: make room to rebuild with an industriousness of spirit we may not have known possible. Let us not point fingers at FEMA for a moment and, like Coleridge in his Mariner's Rhyme, fill ourselves with the poetry of thirstiness, no matter the costs.

Signposts towards a Self-Organized Criticality

There has been a mutiny onboard Flight 613. From UK's Daily Mail:

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.

Mrs Schofield, 38, said: "The plane was not yet full and it became apparent that people were refusing to board. In the gate waiting area, people had been talking about these two, who looked really suspicious with their heavy clothing, scruffy, rough, appearance and long hair.

"Some of the older children, who had seen the terror alert on television, were starting to mutter things like, 'Those two look like they're bombers.'

"Then a family stood up and walked off the aircraft. They were joined by others, about eight in all. We learned later that six or seven people had refused to get on the plane.

"There was no fuss or panic. People just calmly and quietly got off the plane. There were no racist taunts or any remarks directed at the men.

"It was an eerie scene, very quiet. The children were starting to ask what was going on. We tried to play it down."

In the spirit of the Mutiny of Flight 613, this is an excerpt from the book Complexity and Network Centric Warfare:

The intricate interrelationships of elements within a complex system give rise to multiple chains of dependencies. Change happens in the context of this intricate intertwining at all scales. We become aware of change only when a different pattern becomes discernible. But before change at a macro level can be seen, it is taking place at many micro levels simultaneously. Hence, microcomponent interaction and change leads to macrosystem evolution.

I think we must admit that when race-sensitive, progressive, enlightened, PC pasteurized British families start politely getting up to leave their very expensive plane seats simply because they see Arabs speaking in Arabic, a different pattern has become discernible.

As Victor David Hanson writes:

As the cliché goes: the Middle East needs to wake up and disown Islamic fascism. Otherwise, insidiously the entire world is turning against it, as radical Islam proves to be every bit as frightening an ideology as German Nazism or Soviet Communism — whether this is ascertained from the use of human shields, tribal lynchings and beheadings, Joseph Goebbles-like propaganda, Holocaust-denial, racist rants, or primordial hatred of Jews.

Three years ago no one was talking about profiling at airports. Now the British are exploring how best to do it. Indeed, one of the stranger developments in recent memory is now taking place the world over: Young, Middle-Eastern, Muslim men are eyed and studied by passengers at every airport — even as governments still lecture about the evils of the very profiling that their own millions are doing daily. Muslims can thank al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and an entire culture that won’t condemn terrorism for such ostracism, which only increases with each suicide bomber, human shield, hijacking, kidnapping, and macabre reference to genocide and Jew-killing.

In an amorphous war of self-induced Western restraint, like the present one, truth and moral clarity are as important as military force. This past month, the world of the fascist jihadist and those who tolerate him was once again on display for civilization to fathom. Even the most timid and prone to appeasement in the West are beginning to see that it is becoming a question of “the Islamists or us.”

In this eleventh hour, that is a sort of progress after all.

The individual Western mind is hardening against the threat posed by Radical Islam.
At many micro-levels of Western society, socio-ideological apperceptions and postures are changing simultaneously. Such 'insidious' movement will, sooner or later, cross a threshold, a critical point after which all these disparate adaptations will combine for transcendant effect. If the Islamists continue their grotesque agenda, it is only a matter of time before the system of Western society exhibits signs of macro-evolution in its response to Islam.

Our survival strategies are changing. Flight 613 is a harbinger of what's to come.

Information Operations (I/O)

Excerpts from "Information Operations: Putting the 'I' back in DIME", an official strategy paper written by Robert Steele:

IO content can be thought of in two parts: Strategic Communication (the message) and OSINT (the reality). The first cannot be effective without the second. It is not possible to craft the right message, nor to deliver that message to the right person at the right time in the right context, without first understanding “ground truth” at a substate level of granularity (tribes, villages, neighborhoods). OSINT is the horse seeing the path, strategic communication is the cart carrying the message. One must precede the other.

Surge local focus for ATTENTION. Classified assets simply do not surge. Classified imagery satellites are optimized for hard targets and do not do well against jungle canopy or caves in mountains. Signals capabilities are terribly ineffective against Third World languages and fast-changing signatures. Clandestine assets tend to be clustered in the capital cities and focused on the cocktail party circuit. They also do not transfer well—in one case, two clandestine case officers sent to Somalia without language skills literally became unhinged, according to an extensive investigation by The Washington Post. In contrast, private sector capabilities, with all necessary language and local knowledge qualifications, focused on open sources can surge very ably.43 Commercial imagery on demand within 2 days, with 2-day repeat cycles, and 1-meter resolution? Broadcast monitoring, local area gray literature collection, mosque sermon monitoring, a photograph of an arms dealer’s front door taken with a cell phone camera, boots on the ground for verifying whether the new uranium mine really exists? No problem. Not only no problem, but available at a fraction of the cost of a classified asset. All you need is a decent budget and a mind-set acknowledging that legal and ethical open sources of information just might be your best option. It bears mention that open sources can be discreet—commercial enterprises and private investigators routinely sign and enforce nondisclosure agreements with severe penalties for infractions.

Since DHS and its constituencies cannot afford the high-end systems that DoD has been funding for itself, and DoD cannot afford to pay for 50 to 5,000 C4I nodes across America, there is only one option: an open source software solution that allows everyone to tie in to a new Open Source Information System-External (OSIS-X), and the melding of OSIS-X into an Application-Oriented Network (AON)60 that permits the sharing of secret information on a by-name basis regardless of nationality 24/7. There is a subtlety involved in all this that requires strong scrutiny by both DoD and DHS information and intelligence managers. While DoD can and should be responsible for global monitoring in support of defense missions, we must be accutely conscious of the possibility (in my opinion) that 50 percent of the “dots” relevant to preventing the next 9/11 will be “bottom-up” dots collected at the county level by direct observation from citizens, public employees, and law enforcement professionals. Today those dots have no place to go. Although congressional hearings have been held and will be held again on the need for a national domestic intelligence network, DoD should consider a pilot project with the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and a few key states (e.g., New York, Texas, Virginia) in which DoD’s man-machine foreign language processing capabilities are made available to all 911 operators, at the same time that a new number, 119, is established as a pathway for citizens to report via locationally-aware voice, image, or electronic message, any suspicious individuals, packages, or activities.

The bulk of the money for intelligence is invested in technical collection rather than in Tasking, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TPED). Of intelligence funding, 99 percent is focused on secret collection rather than open source information acquisition and exploitation. Emerging threats and nonstate actors are best understood through realization of Dr. Cambone’s vision of universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages, using open sources of information. At the same time, DoD lacks adequate personnel with language skills relevant to most of the complex emergencies and conflict zones where U.S. forces are engaged.

The global information explosion and its logarithmic increase cannot be understated. Figure 2 illustrates where information quantities are headed. Information has doubled over these past years, so we are now looking at 100 billion gigabytes or 100 exabytes, roughly equivalent to 2 trillion four-door filing cabinets of hard-copy documents. Within this complex multimedia and multilingual environment, the noise to signal ratio will get tougher, and so also will the early warning, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition challenges. This is just the digital information—when one adds unpublished local or expert knowledge, locally-available hard copy or “gray literature,” and geospatial information as well as television and audio programming not available through the Internet, the awesome magnitude of this challenge becomes apparent.

Within each nation-state, the national government, the military, and the national law enforcement community represent just a fraction of the local knowledge and the direct access to varied open sources of multilingual and multimedia information. The seven other “tribes” include the business sector, the academic community, the NGOs, the local or regional news media, and self-organized citizen groups, labor unions, and religious congregations. Our concept of operations provides for the facilitation of web-based voluntary but also accredited and authenticated participation by any and all elements whose employees will be afforded anonymous access across the system, with the entire process taking place generally through and with the encouragement of their governments. The creation of such networks within each nation-state, and within each region, actually facilitates strategic communication in that the same network used to receive open source information can also be used to broadcast, in a carefully measured manner, specific messages to specific groups.

The U.S. Government has some pockets of excellence in sensemaking, but, in general, most of the government, including DoD, is still in the industrial era of paper reports and isolated human analysts trying to “connect the dots” without adequate toolkits. DoD needs a Strategic Decision-Support Center such as has been proposed by Captain Scott Philpott, USN, one of the original architects of the USSOCOM “pit.” Such a Center must bring together in one place the following elements:

• OSINT super-searchers with global access;
• Classified super-searchers with full access to all raw secrets;
• Brainstorming network with both in-house and distributed experts;
• Geospatially and time/date-based visualization; and,
• Modeling and simulation using rapid response incremental approaches.

[Me: The rapid Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination of the German video 'Green Helmet Guy' could have immediately switched Hezbollah's PR victory of Qana into a psychological victory for Israel. Moral shaming--the appeal to emotional intuition to engender a specific reaction--is most effective when coupled with such visceral fare. Such an information operation would have been very effective had the US or Israel been able to exploit and disseminate the damning video using all government and media channels it could find. In the future, the US should task analysts to comb the web and local media for such things, and, either anticipating its worth or empirically testing by distributing it overnight to a blog, then saturate main media channels with the product. Furthermore, the US should have several of these IO's in its quiver before operations begin, and it should have an exploitation strategy that takes into account the non-abelian nature of crescendo, and the muffling effect of point-counterpoint.]

DoD needs to create or contract for a global open source acquisition, analytics, and technical information-sharing environment. It must be able to increase by an order of magnitude, and then a double order of magnitude, the near-real-time multilingual and multimedia information that can be delivered to DoD elements. It would be used to support operational planning, acquisition and logistics management, and all-source intelligence targeting, evaluation, and integrated production. This capability must merge global acquisition, translation, statistical analysis, analytic services (including historical and cultural analysis), and tailored dissemination in near-real-time. Such a capability will dramatically reinforce DoS public diplomacy, DoD strategic communication, and other missions, while being directly transferable to DHS. For example, the man-machine foreign language network can be used to reinforce all 911 Emergency Responder networks now lacking in foreign language capabilities.

There is no substitute for subject-matter experts (SME). However, the current practice is biased in favor of SMEs who are captive within vendor organizations, and consequently just one layer removed from the bureaucratic mind-sets they are supporting. There is also a bias toward SMEs that are U.S. citizens and have clearances. This is not the most effective means of understanding the real world. Instead, we must strike a balance in our outreach and integration by embracing:

• World-class experts regardless of nationality, hired one day at a time,
• World-class experts that are U.S. citizens without clearances,
• Retired government or private sector specialists, and
• Dedicated full-time analysts at the journeyman level.

If a vendor cannot readily identify the top 25 experts in the world on any topic, he or she is not ready to provide world-class support.

Precision Strategic Communication.
Novices do broadcast press releases. Journeymen do specialized lists. The real masters, however, know how to reach key communicators in any domain, any country, “by name.” Moreover, they employ individualized messages, informed by values-based biographies and sophisticated social network analysis.

Our second analytic frame of reference combines a deep understanding of human psychology and sociology with a suitably complex yet refined understanding of the dimensions of revolutionary change in any nation-state, tribe, or neighborhood. Analysis of emerging and unconventional threats is not about traditional orders of battle, but rather about the psychology of the individual and the sociology of the substate group. It is about connecting ideas and people.

Implementation of Network-Centric War (NCW)

The following are excerpts of Government Document D 1.2:N 38, published by Dept. of Defense, Office of Force Transformation:

Network-centric warfare is an emerging theory of war in the Information Age. It is also a concept that, at the highest level, constitutes the military’s response to the Information Age. NCW is characterized by the ability of geographically dispersed forces to attain a high level of shared battlespace awareness that is exploited to achieve strategic, operational, and tactical objectives in accordance with the commander’s intent. This linking of people, platforms, weapons, sensors, and decision aids into a single network creates a whole that is clearly greater than the sum of its parts. The results are networked forces that operate with increased speed and synchronization and are capable of achieving massed effects, in many situations, without the physical massing of forces required in the past.

The implementation of NCW is first of all about human behavior as opposed to information technology. NCW theory has applicability at all three levels of warfare—strategic, operational, and tactical—and across the full range of military operations from major combat operations to stability and peacekeeping operations.

A networked force conducting network-centric operations (NCO) is an essential enabler for the conduct of effects-based operations by U.S. forces. Effects-based operations (EBO) are 'sets of actions directed at shaping the behavior of friends, neutrals, and foes in peace, crisis, and war.' EBO in the 21st century, enabled by networked forces, is a methodology for planning, executing, and assessing military operations designed to attain specific effects that achieve desired national security outcomes.

Governing Principles:
1. Fight first for Information superiority.
2. Access to information: shared awareness.
3. Speed of command and decision making.
4. Self-synchronization.
5. Dispersed forces: non-contiguous operations.
6. Demassification.
7. Deep sensor reach.
8. Alter initial conditions at higher rates of change.
9. Compressed operations and levels of war.

Fight First for Information Superiority: Generate an information advantage through better timeliness, accuracy, and relevance of information.

• Increase an enemy’s information needs, reduce his ability to access information, and raise his uncertainty.
• Assure our own information access through a well networked and interoperable force and protection of our information systems, including sensor systems.
• Decrease our own information needs, especially in volume, by increasing our ability to exploit all of our collectors.

Shared Awareness: Routinely translate information and knowledge into the requisite level of common understanding and situational awareness across the spectrum of participants in joint and combined operations.

• Build a collaborative network of networks, populated and refreshed with quality intelligence and non-intelligence data, both raw and processed, to enable forces to build a shared awareness relevant to their needs.
• Information users must also become information suppliers, responsible for posting information without delay. Allow access to the data regardless of location.
• High-quality shared awareness requires secure and assured networks and information that can be defended.

Speed of Command and Decision Making: Recognize an information advantage and convert it into a competitive advantage by creating processes and procedures otherwise impossible (within prudent risk).

• Through battlefield innovation and adaptation, compress decision timelines to turn information advantage into decision superiority and decisive effects.
• Progressively lock out an adversary’s options and ultimately achieve option dominance.

Self-Synchronization: Increase the opportunity for low-level forces to operate nearly autonomously and to re-task themselves through exploitation of shared awareness and the commander’s intent.

• Increase the value of subordinate initiative to produce a meaningful increase in operational tempo and responsiveness.
• Assist in the execution of the “commander’s intent.” Exploit the advantages of a highly trained, professional force.
• Rapidly adapt when important developments occur in the battlespace and eliminate the step function character of traditional military operations.

Dispersed Forces: Move combat power from the linear battlespace to non-contiguous operations.

• Emphasize functional control vice physical occupation of the battlespace and generate effective combat power at the proper time and place.
• Be non-linear in both time and space, but achieve the requisite density of power on demand.
• Increase close coupling of intelligence, operations, and logistics to achieve precise effects and gain temporal advantage with dispersed forces.

Demassification: Move from an approach based on geographically contiguous massing of forces to one based upon achieving effects.

• Use information to achieve desired effects, limiting the need to mass physical forces within a specific geographical location.
• Increase the tempo and speed of movement throughout the battlespace to complicate an opponent’s targeting problem.

Deep Sensor Reach: Expand use of deployable, distributed, and networked sensors, both distant and proximate, that detect actionable information on items of interest at operationally relevant ranges to achieve decisive effects.

• Leverage increasingly persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).
• Use sensors as a maneuver element to gain and maintain information superiority.
• Exploit sensors as a deterrent when employed visibly as part of an overt display of intent.
• Enable every weapon platform to be a sensor, from the individual soldier to a satellite.

Alter Initial Conditions at Higher Rates of Change: Exploit the principles of high-quality shared awareness, dynamic selfsynchronization, dispersed and de-massed forces, deep sensor reach, compressed operations and levels of war, and rapid speed of command to enable the joint force to swiftly identify, adapt to, and change an opponent’s operating context to our advantage. Warfare is highly path-dependent; hence, the imperative to control the initial conditions. The close coupling in time of critical events has been shown historically to have profound impact both psychologically and in locking out potential responses.

Compressed Operations and Levels of War: Eliminate procedural boundaries between Services and within processes so that joint operations are conducted at the lowest organizational levels possible to achieve rapid and decisive effects.

• Increase the convergence in speed of deployment, speed of employment, and speed of sustainment.
• Eliminate the compartmentalization of processes (e.g., organize, deploy, employ, and sustain) and functional areas (e.g., operations, intelligence, and logistics).
• Eliminate structural boundaries to merge capabilities at the lowest possible organizational levels, e.g., joint operations at the company/sub-squadron/task unit level.

Where Industrial Age warfare revolved around efforts to obtain overwhelming force and attrition, NCW revolves around information superiority16 and precision violence to dismantle an opposing force.

A survey of recent and emerging military theories and the future of war has led to the observation that, “In the 1990s, military theory reflected the rapid diffusion of conflict following the end of the bipolar Cold War world.” These theories ranged from John Mueller’s “obsolescence of major war” theory and Martin van Creveld’s argument that Western military theory derived from classical warfare had become obsolescent to Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s theory of “third wave” high-technology information warfare. According to the Tofflers and the Information Age theorists who followed them, the Gulf War of 1990–91 had provided a glimpse of postmodern war as the realm of high technology. On the other hand, military writers like Ralph Peters, Robert Kaplan, and Philip Cerny have offered visions of future war involving the “coming anarchy” of a world of failed states or a struggle by the West against a world of warrior cultures and paramilitaries. The intellectual challenge facing military professionals in the early 21st century is not, as some are suggesting, “to consign Carl von Clausewitz to the dustbin of history. Rather the task is to learn how to fight effectively across the spectrum of conflict.”18 The NCW theory of war, as it is implemented throughout the U.S. Armed Forces, addresses this formidable task.

Information Superiority is an imbalance in one’s favor in the information domain with respect to an adversary. The power of superiority in the information domain mandates that the United States fight for it as a first priority even before hostilities begin … The quality of the information position depends on the accuracy, timeliness, and relevance of information from all sources … The continuous sharing of information from a variety of sources enables the fully networked Joint Force to achieve the shared situational awareness necessary for decision superiority.

The required attributes and capabilities of a new joint force capable of conducting NCO must be carefully considered for each of these four domains:

Physical Domain: The physical domain is the traditional domain of warfare where a force is moved through time and space. It spans the land, sea, air, and space environments where military forces execute the range of military operations and where the physical platforms and communications networks that connect them reside. Comparatively, the elements of this domain are the easiest to measure and, consequently, combat power has traditionally been measured in the physical domain.

Information Domain: The information domain is the domain where information is created, manipulated, and shared. It is the domain that facilitates the communication of information among warfighters. This is the domain of sensors and the processes for sharing and accessing sensor products as well as “finished” intelligence. It is where C2 of military forces is communicated and the commander’s intent is conveyed. Consequently, it is increasingly the information domain that must be protected and defended to enable a force to generate combat power in the face of offensive actions by an adversary.

Cognitive Domain: The cognitive domain is in the mind of the warfighter. This is the realm of EBO. Many, though not all, battles, campaigns, and wars are won in this domain. The intangibles of leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, and situational awareness are elements of this domain. This is the domain where commander’s intent, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures reside. This is also where decisive battlespace concepts and tactics emerge.

Social Domain: The social domain describes the necessary elements of any human enterprise. It is where humans interact, exchange information, form shared awareness and understandings, and make collaborative decisions. This is also the domain of culture, the set of values, attitudes, and beliefs held and conveyed by leaders to the society, whether military or civil. It overlaps with the information and cognitive domains, but is distinct from both. Cognitive activities by their nature are individualistic; they occur in the minds of individuals. However, shared sensemaking—the process of going from shared awareness to shared understanding to collaborative decision making—is a socio-cognitive activity because the individual’s cognitive activities are directly impacted by the social nature of the exchange and vice versa.

Domain intersections represent important, dynamic areas within which concept-focused experimentation should be conducted. The precision force so vital to the conduct of successful joint operations is created at the intersection of the information and physical domains. Shared awareness and tactical innovation occur at the intersection between the information and cognitive domains. Since many battles and campaigns are actually won or lost in the cognitive domain, this intersection is enormously important. The intersection between the physical and cognitive domains is where the time compression and “lock-out” phenomenon occur, where tactics achieve operational and even strategic effects, and where high rates of change are developed. NCW exists at the very center where all four domains intersect.

“Networked” is one of the seven attributes, identified by the JOpsC, that the future Joint Force must possess, the others being “fully integrated,” “expeditionary,” “decentralized,” “adaptable,” “decision superiority,” and “lethality.”

Horizontal Fusion—a Catalyst for Net-Centric Transformation: The term “horizontal” refers to the ability to reach across traditionally stove-piped organizations; and “fusion” refers to the process and applications that allow net-centric “melding.” Users will be able to seek the information they need across the battlespace through “smart-pull” and, in turn, information sharing. This process is described by the verbs task, post, process, and use (TPPU). With TPPU, the user can smart-pull information in seconds rather than minutes. To be effective, the TPPU process requires interoperable infrastructures within the DoD and across external U.S. and coalition intelligence-gathering organizations. Real-time collaboration allows users, regardless of their respective communities of interest, to share insights and add value to posted information; it will also allow geographically separated commanders and units to act as a cohesive team by sharing a common operational picture (COP).

Sense and Respond Logistics: An initiative sponsored by the Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Sense and Respond Logistics (SRL) is an emerging logistics concept tied closely to NCW theory and practice, as evidenced by some of its main characteristics: shared awareness, speed and coordination, dynamic synchronization, adaptability and flexibility, and networked organization. Units operating under the SRL concept are networked and dynamically synchronized to satisfy demand in response to changes in the environment. Therefore, all units within that network are potential consumers and providers of supply to and from all other units in the network.

Military competition is continuous and no military is as thoroughly studied as our own. As we have become more formidable on the traditional battlefield, potential adversaries have moved to the extremes of terrorism and irregular warfare at one end and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and catastrophic warfare at the other. Just as the Department must shift its focus to these extremes, so must it work to exploit NCW principles and sources of power there.

Israel-Lebanon War--A Post Mortem

The ceasefire has been implemented. David Ignatius writes:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is getting bashed at home for failing to deliver a quick victory over Hezbollah. But he deserves credit for recognizing the need for a political settlement that enhanced the authority of the Lebanese state. He wisely resisted pressure from his generals to mount a major ground offensive north of the Litani River, understanding that this quest for a decisive military solution would only take Israel deeper into the Lebanese quagmire.

In Alloyed and Annealed, I wrote:

If Israel pursues its military solution, nobody gets what they want -- even if Hezbollah is virtually destroyed. Israel cannot get what it wants militarily.

I predicted a political solution that would strengthen the Lebanese government while discrediting Hezbollah in Lebanese politics. I wrote:

Basically, we have to make this fight end in a victory for the Lebanese government, and in a defeat for the Hezbollah. The Lebanese need to feel saved by the democrats, and betrayed by the Islamists. As Rice says, "The most important thing that this does for the process is that it shows a Lebanese government that is functioning as a Lebanese government. That is in and of itself extremely important."

Ignatius reports that this is exactly what is happening:

The surprise hero of the conflict was Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. He was a forceful advocate for the Lebanese people and for the very idea of the Lebanese state -- no small achievement in a nation still recovering from civil war. He managed to hold his government together, including the two Cabinet members from Hezbollah. And he was the architect of key elements of the final cease-fire deal: He urged one quick U.N. resolution, rather than the two the Americans and French favored; and he successfully argued for an expansion of the existing UNIFIL force to accompany the Lebanese army in the south, rather than an entirely new international force.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah is in a catch-22:

As the war dragged on, most pundits judged the group's leader Hasan Nasrallah the big winner. But that will be true, paradoxically, only if he abides by the deal Siniora made and withdraws his armed fighters from south Lebanon. ...

If Nasrallah doesn't behave more responsibly and abide by the new U.N. framework, both he and Lebanon are doomed.

This will put enormous political pressure on Nasrallah. If he succumbs to the pressure and allows the Lebanese Army to control the border area, he and Hezbollah will lose their raison d'etre as a militant organization. If he chooses to pound his chest and instigate another crisis, Hezbollah will be disarmed by Israel, Lebanon, or the international community, and will thereafter be utterly discredited politically.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese democrats are consolidating their newfound prestige:

Parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri has accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of trying to rob Lebanon of its "victory" against
Israel while failing to fight for the occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

"He wants to be a partner in the confrontation against the Israeli occupation, but we would have hoped that he practiced this partnership on the occupied Golan Heights front," he said to loud applause on Thursday.

[Walid] Jumblatt hailed the deployment of government troops to south Lebanon for the first time in decades earlier Thursday.

"After 33 days of Israeli bombardments, we were targeted two days ago with another kind of bombardment ... as the master of the (presidential) palace in Damascus decided to address the Lebanese with a speech.

"There is a neighboring president who is threatening to destroy the political set-up in Lebanon because he can not digest the Lebanese people's decision to throw out his corruption and troops from Lebanon," he said.

For the Lebanese democrats, attacking Syria indirectly attacks the legitimacy of Hezbollah, and directly augments their own.

The democrats are the victors, having foiled Israel's military plans and having induced a ceasefire, and now they are cashing in on their political capital. This is a strategic victory for the Bush Doctrine.

Ignatius, however, has one complaint:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was lamentably slow in her initial diplomatic efforts, and the United States has paid a severe price in the credibility of its Mideast "democracy agenda.'' But Rice and her colleagues improved their performance as the crisis deepened, and they did well in brokering the final deal. And I sense the administration has learned a big lesson -- which is that America must continue the aggressive diplomatic role it belatedly embraced over the past month.

Surprisingly for such a smart guy, I think Ignatius misses the point. When speaking of the dilemmas facing US foreign policy during the Korean War, Kissinger wrote:

The simplest and most easily comprehensible war aim would have been a literal application of the Security Council resolutions--to push North Korean forces back to their starting point along the 38th Parallel. But if there was to be no penalty for aggression, how was future aggression to be discouraged? If potential aggressors came to understand that they would never do worse than the status quo ante, containment might turn into an endless progression of limited wars that would deplete America's strength.

It was of paramount importance that Hezbollah be punished for its aggression. We could not allow a situation to develop where Israel was forced into a premature ceasefire that did not significantly alter the strategic status quo ante. Therefore, we needed to buy Israel time to do what it could.

Jed Babbin thinks UN Resolution 1701 is an unmitigated defeat for Israel and the West (thanks to Marc Schulman at American Future for the heads-up):

From America's and Israel's actions, a clear message was sent to the state sponsors of terrorism: neither the United States nor its allies are at all serious about defeating and disarming terrorists. The scope of victories the West can achieve over terrorists is defined by the limits of what the Arab League will insist upon in the UN. All the West's military might is powerless against a highly motivated, well-funded and well-trained adversary who refuses to stand and fight on the conventional battlefield. The only reason this is true is because we are too irresolute to match the enemy's determination to win. We—and the Israelis—choose to not apply the force we have in a manner that will achieve the effect we say we desire.

In Marc's comment section, I wrote:

That’s absurd. The United States is committed to changing the political reality in the Middle East, which, in theory, is the only way to defeat a ‘mass movement’ of grass roots religious extremism. The gains of the Cedar Revolution had to be preserved, and that is what drove our policy. The worst outcome would have been a dissolution of Lebanon’s democracy and a return of the politics of the AK-47. That would have put Syria and Hezbollah right at the front of the power line, for as far into the future as one can see.

The Arab League will be called upon to support our line at the UN vis-a-vis Iran. Perhaps Babbin knows a world where diplomacy does not entail at least a modicum of quid pro quo, but it’s not the one we’re living in.

So did we win? On July 29th, I wrote:

Siniora's government would win by carrying the honor of its people -- it would be the David who drove back the Israeli Goliath -- and by delivering stability and prosperity afterwards. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq would all get what they want, too: a politically and militarily quarantined Hezbollah, and an isolated and receding Iran, all while maintaining street cred with their people by demanding an end to the violence. It would be a major victory in the war on terror.

Lebanon needs to alloy its trauma with triumph and relief, and the democratic Lebanese government needs to be annealed.

It would be a brilliant move, if we could pull it off.

So far, it must be said that we played our cards exactly right.

Now, our pieces are set for an all out diplomatic confrontation with Iran.

In The Unremarkable Strategy, I addressed the warping effect Iran was having on our current diplomacy. That was an analysis that I had not seen elsewhere, but I think it's beginning to pick up steam. This is Noah Pollak giving one cheer for the ceasefire:

Undoubtedly, the most important and highest-priority U.S. and Israeli objective in the Middle East today is thwarting Iran’s nuclear-weapons project. This basic calculus is the context in which American and Israeli Middle East strategic thinking takes place today.

If the U.S. is to strike Iran, Israel must be deterred from being provoked into the conflict and jeopardizing the abstention of other Arab states from interference in the clean execution of the mission and its aftermath. ... The way Iran would drag Israel into the war and dramatically complicate the U.S. mission would be through Hezbollah, which until recently was firmly entrenched on Israel’s northern border, fully armed and spoiling for a fight. Thus, even given Israel’s curtailed and incomplete war against Hezbollah, the U.S.’s — and arguably, Israel’s — primary objective in the conflict has been accomplished: creating a state of affairs in which Iran cannot use Hezbollah to drag Israel into the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, incite Arab opposition to the U.S., and threaten a global energy crisis.

But why stop Israel now? Wouldn’t all of the benefits to the American-Israeli strategic position be even further solidified by a more complete destruction of Hezbollah? Perhaps. But there are complications: One is the unrest the conflict is causing in Iraq. The U.S. doesn't need Muqtada al-Sadr to feel any more emboldened than he already does. Moreover, American pressure on Israel to stop the war is likely a concession to Europe and the U.N. in advance of needing (or believing to need) those alliances to be healthy in anticipation of the Iran confrontation. Also, the Cedar Revolution and the partial wresting of Syria out of Lebanon are two of the most tangible victories of the Bush administration’s Middle East democratization project. A continued Israeli assault on Lebanon that is seen by Lebanon’s ostensibly pro-Western Christians, Druze, and Sunnis as being needless American-approved destruction threatens the sympathies of the nascent Lebanese moderates. In particular, France retains some prestige in Lebanon and can be useful in preventing the reversal of U.S. accomplishments there. Pressuring Israel is a way to give the Europeans and the U.N. something they want now in return for something the U.S. wants later, which is a basic level of unity and fortitude in dealing with Iran.

Finally, one of the most surprising occurrences in the past month was the hostility expressed by the Sunni Arab world to Shia Hezbollah’s provocation. The importance of this should not be understated: Arab regimes like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia actually publicly condemned other Arabs who were fighting against Israel. Why? Because the Sunni regimes are worried about the ascendance of a Shia alliance comprised of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran that could manipulate the region with proxy terrorist armies (such as Hezbollah) operating under the safety of an Iranian nuclear umbrella. The Sunni states dislike Hezbollah and Iran enough to condemn the “adventuresome” attack against Israel, but detest Israel enough — and are sufficiently aware of the contours of their own domestic public opinion — to oppose a protracted Israeli reprisal. Given their fear of a nuclear Shia Middle East, the Sunni states can likely be counted on to tacitly accept a U.S. strike on Iran. Hence, pressure from them to make their acquiescence to an Iran operation contingent on U.S. endorsement of the ceasefire, in the interest of pacifying their publics.

Since that is exactly what I've been saying, I'm going to have to say that Pollak is exactly right.

Philip Bobbitt

If you haven't read Bobbitt's book Shield of Achilles, you should. If you want to brush up on his core ideas, go here.

Excerpt: Five Developments that Threaten the Constitutional Order of National States

The State is changing, and this change in the State will be constitutional in nature, by which I mean we will change our views as to the basic raison d'etre of the State, that legitimating purpose that justifies the State and sets the terms of the State's strategic endeavours.

At present our model of statecraft links the sovereignty of a state to its territorial borders. Within these borders the state is supreme with respect to its law, and beyond its border the state earns the right of recognition and intercourse to the extent that it can defend its borders. Today this model confronts several deep challenges. And because the international order is constructed on the foundation of this model of state sovereignty, events that cast doubt on that sovereignty call the entire system into question.

Five such developments do so: (1) the recognition of human rights as norms that require domestic adherence by all states, regardless of their internal laws; (2) the development of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, which render the defense of State borders ineffectual for the protection of a society; (3) the emerging recognition of global and transnational threats that transcend state borders, such as those that damage the environment, or threaten states through migration, population expansion, and disease or famine; (4) the growth of a world economic regime that ignores borders in the movement of capital investment to a degree that effectively curtails states in the management of their economic affairs; (5) the threat to national cultures posed by the revolution in international communication, linking all cultures to one language that competes with local forms and penetrates borders electronically. As a consequence, a constitutional order will arise that reflects these five developments and indeed exalts them as requirements that only this new order can meet. The emergence of a new basis for the State will also change the constitutional framework of international society, a framework that derives from the domestic constitutional orders of its constituent members.

Excerpt: The Relationship Between Military Innovations and Changes in the Constitutional Order

Ever since Max Weber, scholars have debated whether a revolution in military affairs brought forth the modern State by creating an acute necessity for an organized system of finance and administration in order to wage war successfully. Accepting this premise, however, it is unclear precisely which revolution in military affairs actually brought the modern State into being. Was it the development of mobile artillery in the 16th century that abruptly rendered the castles and moats of the middle ages useless? Or was it the Gunpowder Revolution of the 17th century that replaced the shock tactics of pikemen with musket fire? Or the rise in professionalism within the military in the 18th century and the cabinet wars this made possible (or was it the change in tactics that accompanied mass conscription in the 19th)? One important consequence of asking this question in this way, however, is that it assumes that there has been only one form of the modern State – the nation-state. If, as many believe, the nation-state is dying owing to the five developments mentioned above, then this scholarly debate about the birth of the State implies that the reign of the State itself is now ending.

But if we see, on the contrary, that each of the important revolutions in military affairs enabled a political revolution in the fundamental constitutional order of the State, then we will not only be able to better frame the scholarly debate but also better able to appreciate that the death of the nation-state by no means presages the end of the State. Moreover, we will then be able to see aright the many current political conflicts that arise from the friction between the decaying nation-state and the emerging market-state, conflicts that have parallels in the past when one constitutional order was replaced by another and led to civil strife within the State. Finally, we will be better prepared to craft new strategies for the use of force that are appropriate to this new constitutional order.

Excerpt: The Relationship Between the Constitutional Order and the International Order

Every society has a constitution. Of course not all of these are written constitutions – the British constitution, for example, is unwritten. Nor does every society happen to be a State. But every society – the Martha's Vineyard Yacht Club no less than the Group of Eight – has a constitution because to be a society is to be constituted in some particular way. Each great peace conference that ended an epochal war wrote a constitution for the society of states. If a revolution in military affairs enables the triumphs of a particular constitutional order then the peace conferences that ratify such triumphs set the terms for admission to the society of legitimate states, a society that is reconstituted after each great epochal war.

Yet all constitutions also carry within themselves the seeds of future conflict. The 1789 U.S. constitution was pregnant with the 1860 civil war because it contained, in addition to a bill of rights, provisions for slavery and state sovereignty. Similarly the international constitutions at Wesphalia in 1648 no less than at Vienna in 1815 or Versailles in 1919 set the terms for the conflict to come even while they settled the conflict just ended. The importance of this idea in our present period of transition is that we can shape the next epochal war if we appreciate its inevitability and also the different forms it may take. I believe that we face the task of developing practices that will enable us to undertake a series of low intensity conflicts. Failing this, we will face an international environment of increasingly violent anarchy and, possibly, a cataclysmic war in the early decades of the next century.

While it is commonly assumed that the nuclear great powers would not (because they need not) use nuclear weapons in an era in which they do not threaten each other, in fact the new era which we are entering makes the use of nuclear weapons by a great power more likely than in the last half century.

Deterrence and assured retaliation, which laid the basis for the victory of the parliamentary nation-state in the Cold War era, cannot provide a similar stability in the era of the market state to come because the source of the threats to a state are now at once too ubiquitous and too easy to disguise. We cannot deter an attacker whose identity is unknown to us. As a consequence, we are just beginning to appreciate the need for a shift from target, threat-based assessments to vulnerability analyses. What is less appreciated is the consequent loss of intra-war deterrence and the implications of this loss with respect to the actual use of nuclear weapons. Or to illustrate this paradoxical phenomenon by means of a different example: nuclear weapons do not deter biological weapons and yet they are probably the only feasible means of destroying a biological stockpile that is easy to hide and fortify. Ironically the possibility of cataclysmic war is more threatening in the 21st century yet defensive systems can play a far more useful role than they could in the previous period, when they tended to weaken deterrence.

At the same time we have experienced these quiet yet disturbing changes in the strategic environment, there have been ongoing low intensity conflicts of the kind we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Palestine and elsewhere, that are being transformed by the information revolution. Remote, once local tribal wars have engaged the values and interests of all the great powers because these conflicts have been exported into the domestic publics of those powers through immigration, empathy and terrorism.

What are rarely noted are the relation between cataclysmic and low-intensity wars – and their relation to the constitution of the society of market states that will have to fight them. There can be no peace settlement without war. But if we can successfully manage consensus interventions on the part of the great powers, as we have done, finally, in the former state of Yugoslavia, we will have written a new constitution for the society of market states and avoid thereby the systemic breakdown that provokes more generally catastrophic war. It may be that the very vulnerability of the critical infrastructures of the developed world which invites, even necessitates, great power cooperation will then provide a basis for strengthening the society of states through political consensus and market cooperation.

Excerpt: How to Understand the Emerging World of the Market States

There is a widespread sense that we are at a pivotal point in history: but why is it pivotal? The Shield of Achilles provides an answer – that we are at one of a half-dozen moments when the way societies are organized for governance is undergoing a fundamental change. This book identifies that change and shows how it is similar and related to the five previous such pivotal moments of change that began with the emergence of the modern State at the time of the Renaissance. It lays bare the neglected relationship between the military-strategic and the political-constitutional – the outer and inner faces of the State. Moreover this book is just as concerned with the future as it is with the past, laying out alternative possible worlds that are achievable but incompatible – worlds, that is, that will come into being at the cost of alternatives. This book spells out the important choices this change will force on us as we create a new form of the state in the 21st century.

The emergence of a new form of the state and the decay of an old one is part of a process that goes back to the very beginning of the State, perhaps to the beginning of civil society itself. That process is the fusing of the inner and outer dominions of authority – law and strategy. The modern state came into existence when it proved necessary to organize a constitutional order that could wage war more effectively than the feudal and mercantile orders it replaced. Whether war or law was the initial subject of innovation, constitutional and strategic change followed, and new forms of the state were the result of this interaction. Each new form of the State was distinguished by its unique basis for legitimacy – the historical claim it made that entitled the State to power.

Not only the world in which we live, but also the world that is now emerging, are more comprehensible once this historical development is appreciated and explored for the implications it holds for the fate of civilization. As has occurred in the past, a great epochal war has just ended. With the end of this war, a new form of the state, the market state, is coming into being. Where the various competing systems of the contemporary nation state all took their legitimacy from the promise to better the material welfare of their citizens, the market state offers a different covenant: it will maximize the opportunity of its people.

The emergence of the market state will produce conflict in every society as the old ways of the superseded nation state (its use of law to enforce morals, for example) fall away. This emergence will produce alternative systems, too, that follow different versions of the market state in Washington, Singapore and Berlin, and this development also will lead to conflict. Most importantly, however, the global society of market states will face lethal security challenges that its habits of intense competition do not naturally suit it to deal with.

The society of market states is, on the other hand, good at setting up markets. This facility could characterize an international system that rewards peaceful states and stimulates opportunity in education, productivity, investment, environmental protection and public health by sharing the technologies that are crucial to advancement in these areas. And these habits of collaboration can provide precedents for security cooperation: for example, the United States can develop ballistic missile technology or fissile material sensors that can be licensed to threatened countries. The technology for safer nuclear energy can be provided as a way, perhaps the only way, of halting global warning while assisting third world economic development.

The decisions that lead to these choices are already, or will soon be, upon us, but they look different if they are seen in the context of this new form of the State.

Excerpt: The Future of the State

The pattern of epochal wars and state formation, of peace congresses and international constitutions, has played out for five centuries to the end of this millennium. A new constitutional order – the market state – is about to emerge. But if the pattern of earlier eras is to be repeated, then we await a new, epochal war with state-shattering consequences. It is my conclusion that we can shape this war, even if we cannot avoid it. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war is either a general cataclysm or a never-ending, low intensity conflict. An apocalyptic war is in many respects easier to deter, and can be waged by few states, but it risks the annihilation of the developed world. An endless low-intensity conflict can be fought with asymmetrical means, that is, with weapons that defy retaliation or deterrence, and employ tactics like terrorism and cyber-attacks on the critical infrastructures of the developed states, while requiring expensive expeditionary forces of those states.

Whichever course of action is decided upon will be both constitutional and strategic in nature because these are the two faces of the modern State – the inner and the outer, the face the State turns towards its own citizens, and the face it turns towards the outside world of its competitors. Each State develops its own constitutional order (its inward facing profile) as well as its strategic paradigm (its outwardly turned silhouette), and these two forms are logically and topologically inseparable. A state threatened with cyber attacks on its interdependent infrastructures can protect itself by virtually abolishing privacy or by expensively decentralizing; either has profound constitutional consequences. A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries-with equally profound strategic consequences.

The history of our cell-to-tissue-to-organ evolution is defined by competition giving way to cooperation. I think the development of homo societus can be understood in much the same way. Except whereas in the cell the organizational movement was along the spectrum of chemistry, the organizational evolution of society is entirely in the realm of the mind.

A cell that relates to other cells by cannibalizing them will never be fit to cooperate in tissue. A man that cannibalizes other men will never be fit for society. In both, the constitutional structure determines the outer strategy. For the cell, the constitutional structure is its genetic makeup and phenotypic functionality, and it's outer strategy is derivative and incidental. For Man, his constitutional structure is his beliefs and motivations; his outer strategy is derivative and intentional.

A society, as a complex system of 'outer strategies' and inner parameters, can be analyzed in much the same way.

Bush Doctrine--Intermission

Norman Podhoretz writes on the 'greatly exaggerated' death of the Bush Doctrine. He comes to the conclusion that Bush is still committed, and that by 2009 the tenets of the Bush Doctrine will be untouchable pillars of US foreign policy. On Iran:

But it beggars belief that Bush decided to go along with the European approach to Iran because he suddenly discovered that there is wisdom in “hoping for the best” and putting “our faith in the word of tyrants.” To me (pace Richard Perle), it has seemed more likely that he has once again been walking the last diplomatic mile, exactly as when he spent so many months and so much energy working to get the UN to endorse an invasion of Iraq. The purpose, now as then, is to expose the futility of diplomacy where the likes of Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullocracy are concerned, and to show that the only alternative to accepting the threats they pose is military action.

Robert Kagan—a neoconservative who has not given up on Bush—puts this well in describing the negotiations as “giving futility its chance.” Kagan also entertains the possibility that the negotiations are not merely a ploy on Bush’s part, and that his “ideal outcome really would be a diplomatic solution in which Iran voluntarily and verifiably abandoned its [nuclear] program.” However that may be, once having played out the diplomatic string, Bush will be in a strong political position to say, along with Senator John McCain, that the only thing worse than bombing Iran would be allowing Iran to build a nuclear bomb—and not just to endorse that assessment but to act on it.

Podhoretz makes the same claim I do: most people who are complaining about Bush mistake prudence for weakness, and strategic trade-offs for defeats. It is an uncharitable, and unimaginative, criticism.

One of the 'proofs' that Bush still believes in his own doctrine is how successful one can be predicting US action when one stays within confines of the doctrine's logical universe. For instance, one of the doctrine's goals is long-term democracy and stability in the Middle East. Therefore, it was obvious early on that Bush would protect democracy in Lebanon by avoiding an extended war that traumatized and radicalized the Lebanese people (check). And yet, because the pathology of terrorism is to be fought wherever it rears its ugly head, it was also obvious that Bush would seek to buy Israel time to punish Hezbollah and change the strategic situation on her northern border (check). Because Bush wants to confront Iran with an international consensus, it was obvious that France would be made to feel the senior partner on the lesser issue of Lebanon (check). And now, because Iran, the most dangerous terrorist-supporting regime in the world, is openly pursuing nuclear weapons while making unembarrassed, blood-curdling threats, it is obvious that Bush will act on those threats before they have a chance to mature.

The Unremarkable Strategy--Literally

I have been unsuccessful at finding any other strategist or pundit, from MSM on down, who has analyzed our current diplomatic strategy in light of our coming confrontation with Iran. This unsuccess has been surprising.

So here are some questions to consider:

1. Is Iran the center of gravity for our current diplomatic strategy? If it is, then why not consider the US/Israeli acquiescence to a ceasefire a warping effect? As any mathematical theorist can explain, around any large mass, straight lines become curved. Accordingly, if we removed the large mass that is Iran's nuclear program, much of what others complain about makes sense: it is logical to take this time to destroy Hezbollah. However, in a world where all strategies curve back towards Iran, perhaps these comments miss the mark?

2. Would you at least entertain the notion that to mount a serious diplomatic confrontation with Iran, for both domestic and international reasons, the war in Lebanon has to be over?

3. Is not Iran's nuclear program, and not Hezbollah, the bigger threat -- one that is time sensitive to boot?

4. If we are anticipating a diplomatic showdown with Iran, followed perhaps by a punitive military strike on its nuclear sites, would it make sense to stand on principle over Hezbollah and risk our chances of international consensus over Iran? Should we blow our diplomatic wad over a fistful of katyushas, or should we save it for the big dance? Might this not explain our solicitousness of France and her view of ceasefire?

The overriding point is that we need to clear the tracks of all minor traffic so the Big Train can get underway. I think the Administration is getting pretty anxious to begin, and that is why the backtracking on the ceasefire. The only other way this diplomacy makes sense is if you seriously think Bush has given up.

Is Bush that weak, to give in so quickly on his hopes of a lasting peace? Or is he, like Ahab, that single-minded, with a fixed and firm, forward dedication in his glance? Those are the only options I can see. Any comments?

Cybernetics and Kolmogorov

Links:

Knowledge Domains in Engineering Systems.

Kolmogorov online. (HT Allen over at Belmont Club)

And from Buddy Larsen, Herman Kahn. Rand papers here. Hudson Institute here.

Notes on Positive Feedback and Natural Systems

Notes are from: Donald L. DeAngelis et al., Positive Feedback in Natural Systems, Oak Ridge National Laboratories (1986).

Components of systems may be tangible objects (planets, gears, organisms), or they may be "abstract properties like energy storages or amounts of infomration."

In relation to feedback, there are two types of systems.
1. "open loop systems" -- flow of input is all one direction (sun warming earth)
2. "closed loop systems." -- flow is two ways, interdependent.

"The existence of a flow of information from the system "output" to the "input" that regulates the input to maintain a stable set point, is the commonly accepted emblem of a cybernetic system."

Feedback will not always be information flow. It can be change in biomass, energy, or material that only incidentally conveys information affecting the system.

Negative feedback -- deviation counteracting, or homeostatic (regulatory). Actual negative feedback regulation can fail badly if time delays exist that sufficiently slow down the action of negative feedback. Much of the cyclical phenomena we see in nature and society are the result of this imperfect regulation. Negative feedback is necessary for homeostasis, but not always sufficient.

Feedforward -- a variation of positive feedback, but whereas feedback is the effect, delayed in time and perhaps mediated by other system components, that a change in a given component has on itself as a result of a prior change in that component, feedforward is an effect that a component has on itself, again perhaps mediated by other components, because of expected changes in the component.

Positive feedback -- when mutual causal effects are deviation amplifying. It occurs when the response of the system to an initial deviation of the system acts to reinforce the change in the direction of the deviation. (In evolutionary terms, deviations that are reinforced into a criticality are called "frozen accidents".) This positive feedback can cause instabilities and ultimate transitions from one state to another.

Flannery (1972) described the rise of the centralized political state in terms of deviation amplification caused by positive feedback loops. Bateson (1972) described such feedback in interpersonal relations in tribal societies.

Neither positive nor negative feedbacks manifest themselves individually in a conspicuous way. However, when the system is driven far from equilibrium (by a temporary unusual environmental condition, for example), specific positive or negative feedbacks may become very obvious. The system could be driven into a regime where homeostatic forces no longer operate. Positive feedback loops may act to amplify the deviation, perhaps driving the system to extinction. On the other hand, other positive feedback loops may be activated that rescue the system from extinction and allow it to shift back to the point where homeostatic forces restore it to equilibrium.

Information and complexity is increasing in the biosphere (and human society) through evolutionary time in a mutually reinforcing way.

The problem of entropy for this type of evolution was resolved in the 20th century with the recognition that the earth is an "open" thermodynamic system in which entropy can, in principle, decrease. In fact, the modern theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics provides a conceptual framework for understanding the emergence of greater and greater complexity through time both in living and nonliving systems.

Nearly every index of human cultural complexity has increased at a growing rate through human history and, as far as can be fathomed, through human prehistory as well. Halle (1977) points out that every increase in complexity in nature makes possible new changes that could nothave occurred before (non-abelian). As a system becomes more complex, the number of possible novelties increases in proportion to this complexity.

A characteristic of cooperative systems is the presence of "thresholds." When a threshold is crossed, presumably during slow changes in some of the system variables or parameter values, the mode of behavior of the system can suddenly change. Part of the reason for catastrophic failures lies in the very nature of structural design, which emphasizes resilience. Design for resilience stablizes a structure under most conditions, but it can engender a vulnerability to positive feedback amplification of small cracks in the structure.

The "law of collapse" has relevance to advanced economic systems. According to Leontief (1966), such economic systems are composed of a set of "basic" commodities (see Notes on Networks, below: core hubs like water and ATP), each of which is dependent on all others. The loss or severe reduction of one commodity will generate a chain reaction, destroying or damaging all others (see network vulnerability to 'attack'). A similar fragility afflicts advanced societies as a whole. Such societies have evolved a high density of tight interactions among various sectors. Disruption of a part of the society may propagate and could even trigger a total collapse, as has occasionally happened.

Complex systems can compensate for the instability resulting from a high degree of interconnectedness. One way is by redundancy; i.e. if one critical pathway is severed another pathway, perhaps existing only latently, can take over for it (see Strategic Implications of BP turn off, comments, Supply redundancy during Gulf War I). The human brain employs a great deal of functional redundancy.

Summary: At least four generalizations.
1. PF may be essentially involved in processes within systems that bring about increasing complexity.
2. Changes in the system tend ot accelerate, so that rapid transitions from one state to the next can occur.
3. There are frequently thresholds such that small changes in a variable or parameter beyond a certain critical point can trigger large scale change in the system (self-organized criticality).
4. A network of potential PFs, perhaps nont apparent at a given time because held in check, can make a system fragile to certain types of perturbations.

Positive and negative feedbacks have been known to "nest" at specific scales of the system.

An increase in the number of components or interactions in the system increases the number of conditions that must be satisfied for stability; hence, the likelihood of a randomly-connected system being stable decreases as the size of the system increases.

The autocatalysis of atoms in stellar interiors has been called "nuclear evolution", and it is a system of PF (mass to energy taking more mass to energy), and NF (gravity vs. thermal pressure).

Waves in the ocean as PF and NF: At the peak of the developing wave, the air velocity is greater; hence, by Bernoulli's law the air pressure is less than in the trough. The air in the trough circulates in the reverse direction and transfers energy to the water in a manner that increases the wave amplitude. As the wave becomes larger, its structure increases the pressure differential over the water created by the wind and the wave continues to grow (PF) until gravitational forces prevent further growth (NF -- gravitational force as de facto parameter).

The process of dissolution of crystal occurs when the crystal is subjected to increasing temperature. As the temperature increases, defects occur in the structure. The number of defects increases until many are close to each other. "At this point disorder can rise catastrophically because of cooperative effects of the interactions." (Careri, 1984).

Some structures are durable and can provide building blocks on the path to higher levels of organization. Nuclear evolution provided the earth with a variety of stable elements, many of which were able to interact chemically. The stage was set for "chemical evolution." Chemical evolution may be defined as the progressive building up of more complex chemical structures. This can occur when there is an external source of free energy, which can support the sefl-amplifying processes.

These examples show that evolution toward more and more complex organic molecules under primal conditions was not only possible but favored. Each new state, more complex than its predecessor, could have created conditions to make the system more vulnerable to instabilities from new fluctuations. Then the creation of greater and greater molecular complexity can be pictured as a PF loop. The dissipation of energy (along with entropy production) initially increases during each new fluctuation, but then settles down to a lower level as the system adjusts itself to its new constraints. The continued working of this fluctuation-dissipation cycle drives the system further and further from thermal equilibrium (heat death).

Each new level of complexity alters conditions in a way that makes the next level possible.

A species is seldom a passive inhabitant in its environment, but interacts with its surroundings through its behavior. This interaction can result in a second type of positive feedback mechanism that can propel evolutionary change.

The environment (system) itself evolves as its component interactions evolve, creating the possibility for further evolution by organisms discovering and exploiting new opportunities suddenly made available by the new state of the system.

Implications:

As seems clear, terrorism is a deviation that is, for the present, being amplified by certain system components already in existence. Terrorism is experiencing positive feedback (for various reasons). If there is a homeostatic mechanism inherent in our system, it is either nesting at a higher scale of terrorism than we currently inhabit, or the negative feedback mechanism is activating slowly (which might result in the same phenomena as scalar nesting, which would presumably speed it up--or it might be too slow, deleteriously so).

Entropy in the system is currently on the rise. But other components in the system are reacting, too. The race is to the threshold.

Which will be reached first, the higher-complexity threshold, or the system-collapse threshold? I think any serious person would put great confidence in the former. The terrorists operate amidst chaos, thriving in regions of instability and uncertainty. The forces of organization, who can marshal an immense amount of information and power, will surely destroy them.

The Positive-Feedback loop of organizational disaggregation and power atomization stems from the Army of Davids syndrome. The system is changing, and complexity is increasing. In this new system-state, new opportunities are appearing and are being exploited by these various system components -- most notably terrorists. But the forces of organized stability are also expoiting these new realities, as Bobbitt recognizes in his theory of the market-state.

In the end, terrorism will only succeed in bringing about evolved survival mechanisms and an increase in human complexity (right?).

Notes on Science and Complexity

By Warren Weaver (1948):

"To sum up, physical science before 1900 was largely concerned with two-variable problems of simplicity; whereas the life sciences, in which these problems of simplicity are not so often significant, had not yet become highly quantitative or analytical in character."

"What is meant by a problem of disorganized complexity? It is a problem in which the number of variables Is very large, and one in which each of the many variables has a behavior which is individually erratic, or perhaps totally unknown. However, in spite of this helter-skelter, or unknown, behavior of all the individual variables, the system as a whole possesses certain orderly and analyzable average properties.

The motions of the atoms which form all matter, as well as the motions of the stars which form the universe, come under the range of these new techniques. The fundamental laws of heredity are analyzed by them. The laws of thermodynamics, which describe basic and inevitable tendencies of all physical systems, are derived from statistical considerations. The entire structure of modem physics, our present concept of the nature of the physical universe, and of the accessible experimental facts concerning it rest on these statistical concepts. Indeed, the whole question of evidence and the way in which knowledge can be inferred from evidence are now recognized to depend on these same statistical ideas, so that probability notions are essential to any theory of knowledge itself."

"The really important characteristic of the problems of this middle region, which science has as yet little explored or conquered, lies in the fact that these problems, as contrasted with the disorganized situations with which statistics can cope, show the essential feature of organization. In fact, one can refer to this group of problems as those of organized complexity."

"Is a virus a living organism? What is a gene, and how does the original genetic constitution of a living organism express itself in the developed characteristics of the adult? Do complex protein molecules "know how" to reduplicate their pattern, and is this an essential clue to the problem of reproduction of living creatures? All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity."

"How can one explain the behavior pattern of an organized group of persons such as a labor union, or a group of manufacturers, or a racial minority? There are clearly many factors involved here, but it is equally obvious that here also something more is needed than the mathematics of averages. With a given total of national resources that can be brought to bear, what tactics and strategy will most promptly win a war, or better: what sacrifices of present selfish interest will most effectively con-tribute to a stable, decent. and peaceful world?

These problems-and a wide range of similar problems in the biological, medical, psychological, economic, and political sciences-are just too complicated to yield to the old nineteenth~century techniques which were so dramatically successful on two-, three-, or four-variable problems of simplicity. These new problems, moreover, cannot be handled with the statistical techniques so effective in describing average behavior in problems of disorganized complexity.

These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them, requires science to make a third great advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nineteenth~century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twentieth~century victory over problems of disorganized complexity. Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity."

"As an illustration, consider the over-all problem of convoying troops and supplies across the Atlantic. Take into account the number and effectiveness of the naval vessels available, the character of submarine attacks, and a multitude of other factors, including such an imponderable as the dependability of visual watch when men are tired, sick, or bored. Considering a whole mass of factors, some measurable and some elusive, what procedure would lead to the best over-all plan, that is, best from the combined point of view of speed, safety, cost, and so on? Should the convoys be large or small, fast or slow? Should they zigzag and expose themselves longer to possible attack, or dash in a speedy straight line? How are they to be organized, what defenses are best, and what organization and instruments should be used for watch and attack?"

'If science deals with quantitative problems of a purely logical character, if science has no recognition of or concern for value or purpose, how can modern scientific man achieve a balanced good life, in which logic is the companion of beauty, and efficiency is the partner of virtue:

In one sense the answer is very simple: our morals must catch up with our machinery. To state the necessity, however, is not to achieve it. The great gap, which lies so forebodingly between our power and our capacity to use power wisely, can only be bridged by a vast combination of efforts. Knowledge of individual and group behavior must be improved. Communication must be improved between peoples of different languages and cultures, as well as between all the varied interests which use the same language, but often with such dangerously differing connotations. A revolutionary advance must be made in our understanding of economic and political factors. Willingness to sacrifice selfish short-term interests, either personal or national, in order to bring about long-term improvement for all must be developed.

None of these advances can be won unless men understand what science really is; all progress must be accomplished in a world in which modern science is an inescapable, ever-expanding influence."

Notes on Analytical Framework for 21st Century Strategy, Terrorist Networks

The generation of a terrorist is a series of identity acquisitions or subsumations into a network. As a stem cell assumes the identity of the network it is thrown into, so does a human being, to a large extent. Therefore, the Muslimness is acquired by connectivity, and the acquisition of this connection follows the laws set out above. One will become Muslim if the network one finds oneself in is dominated by Muslim hubs. The strength of the connection is the amount of behavior this identity informs. A strong connection would govern a lot of behavior. A weak connection very little.

So we have two big problems here. One is that Muslim hubs (Mosques and Imams) outside of Muslim territory are largely Wahhabi, a type of Islam that creates strong identities of Muslimness. Two, we live in a super-network where one of the parameters is a bar on laws proscribing the free practice of religion, and, accordingly, the free generation of religious identities. Insofar as a strong connection to the overall Muslim network facilitates the transmission of harmful ideas, and insofar as harmful ideas proliferate within the network by retaining the claim to Muslimness (as Wahhabism does), then Wahhabi Mosques will continue to resupply the actual network of Islamic terrorism with low-'k', high clustering coefficient soldiers. Evil men will be able to co-opt these channels to transmit their evil intent to impressionable young men. Muslim extremism will exist so long as this dynamic exists.

Of course, intent must be married to capability before this turns into a huge problem. And capability implies other networks.

A terrorist cell, acting independently, can accomplish only so much. If it tries to reach out and connect to a hub, it risks being discovered. If it tries to act independently, it risks failure. If it tries to grow too much, it risks being noticed.

Notes on Analytical Framework for 21st Century Strategy, Self-Organized Criticality, Complexity and Kurzweil

Self-organized criticality – a class of dynamical system which has a critical point as an attractor (a phase transition as an attractor). The emergence of complexity from simple local interactions could be spontaneous.

Sources: Arxiv Structure, Specifically: Paths to Self-Organized Criticality.

It has been suggested that the scale-free event size of wars (more precisely, purposeful killing) could mean that man-made catastrophes self-organize into criticality, i.e. an attractor exists at the phase transition/critical point between potential and kinetic energy as it applies to human-human relations. However, if you build into the system redundancies, like a type of pressure release or detour, then one may overcome this. This same way of thinking can be applied to markets.

Complexity and contingency govern things like wealth creation (economics). Therefore, a system that can harness the wealth generated by market complexity without regard to any specific outcome is the one the will be successful over time. The dominance of a product over a competitor depends on the accumulation of minor accidental events. The effect (success or failure in the marketplace) comes about when unlinked events become linked (critical point) and together cause the discrete result. The critical point is when complexity is created.

Contingency depends as much the space-time value of events as it does their mere existence.

Also, a system’s response is not necessarily proportional to the size of the impact. A small impacting event could be the catalyst that brings the entire system to a critical point.

A stable phase transition is a frozen accident. The formation of a module that does a specific task is an example of self-organized complexity. The formation of a group of modules into a big module that does something is another.

Large dynamical systems naturally evolve, or self-organize, into a highly interactive, critical state where a minor perturbation may lead to events, called avalanches, of all sizes. Periods of stasis are interrupted by intermittent bursts of activity of all sizes (see Kuhn's Evolution of a Paradigm). Since the systems are noisy, the actual events cannot be predicted, however, the statistical distribution of these events (size/frequency) can be discovered. No quick-fix can stabilize the system and prevent fluctuations, only active flexible management can avoid system failures. If the tape were rewound on history and replayed, with different random noise, the specific outcomes would be different but the topology of the events would be the same. Large catastrophes would be avoided, and others would occur.

Large, catastrophic events occur as a consequence of the same dynamics that produce small, ordinary events. Fractals describe scale-free, or power-law, behavior. The matrix through which the avalanche propagates is predisposed to accommodate events of large sizes. The underlying philosophy is that general features, like the appearance of large catastrophes, and perhaps critical exponents, are not sensitive to the details of the model. Important features of large-scale phenomena are grossly insensitive to the particular details of the models and are shared between seemingly disparate kinds of systems.

Human culture can modulate the basics we get from our genes.

A virus is a naked gene. A meme is like a virus, all it does is try to replicate. An idea can flourish even while reducing genetic fitness to zero. All domesticated species have smaller brains, they have outsourced their toughest problems and no longer need the brainpower.

Pragmatism is based on experience and experiment and not on fixed principles. Pragmatism is an idea about ideas. There will be times when Pragmatism, pragmatically speaking, is no longer useful. Sometimes a belief or idea has a utility apart from its truth-value. This is true of pragmatism as well as other ideological paradigms.

Epistemology: Do I really know what I think I know and how do I know it? Knowledge is distinguished from true belief by its justification – Justified True Belief. Less justified beliefs are “probable opinion” or provisional knowledge. There is the case, however, where a person has a good reason to believe a proposition true, be correct, but not be correct for the reasons used. That is not knowledge. Others have proposed that the evidence for a belief must necessitate its truth before it is knowledge.

Kurzweil: The amount of time needed for evolutionary progress—increases in complexity—has been decreasing as the jumps in complexity have increased. Interestingly, the rate of technological progress fits neatly on this graph. Complexity is being produced swiftly, now.

X -- How long ago the paradigm shift took place, Y -- How long that paradigm shift took until the next paradigm shift. Fruits of evolutionary process grow exponentially because the gains are stored as frozen accidents. Therefore, biological evolution keeps accelerating. Self-organized criticality comes faster and faster (and is scale-invariant). Tech evolution is on straight line with biological evolution. Increased levels of complexity in information processing and energy conversion. Inexorable acceleration is inherent in evolutionary process.

More avalanches (phase-shifts) of all types, with no typical size (effect on entire ecosystem). They can be local or global. The effects can be modular and contained, or they can be universal.

2010: computers disappear
1. images written directly to our retinas by glasses and lenses.
2. ubiquitous high bandwidth connection nto the internet at all times.
3. Electronics so tiny it’s embedded in the environment, our clothing, our eyeglasses.
4. Full Immersion visual-auditory virtual reality.
5. Augmented real reality
6. Interaction with virtual personalities as a primary interface.
7. Effective language technology.

Law of accelerating returns.

Geometry and gravity are connected. Space is curved in a particular way called ‘warped.’

America is decadent, but at the same time it is post-decadent. Structures and institutions that existed for centuries, and in many cases millennia, are decaying, but at the same time we are ‘inventing’ new structures and new institutions and new ways of functioning at an organizational level and interactive level.

Notes on Analytical Framework for 21st Century Strategy, Networks

The next few posts will consist of notes from various disciplines, along with links to primary sources.

First up, Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks. Notes:

On usage: Nodes=players=vertices.

New vertices (nodes) attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected.
Implication: An aspiring terrorist will “connect” to a node that is already well-established and widely used – e.g. a popular website, a noted Imam, etc. This means our best technique would be to not destroy the well-connected nodes, but to appropriate them and use them to attract and collect would-be additions to the network. Only the business end can hurt us.

Development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of individual systems.

How do we analyze networks?
1. Connectivity in networks is not random, does not have Poisson distribution.
2. Expectation when studying the WWW was for random network of links. Power-law distribution, not Poisson, was what was found. K^-2 plot on a histogram.
3. Highway system of US is close to random network, relatively uniform network, won’t find Major City with 200 highways connected to it, and won’t find one with zero.
4. Power-law distribution of WWW is much closer to airline network. Very small nodes and a few major hubs.

Hubs hold network together and “dominate the way you navigate.” Never see hubs in random networks.

This is scale-free network. In a random there is a typical node. On a scale-free network, there are no typical nodes. Even the average node is not typical, no intrinsic scale.

A map of the Internet: every node corresponds to router, links correspond to physical line. Most nodes are on the periphery, but a few major hubs that hold the network together.

Social network: Swedish sexual network, sexual connections within the society. This was also a scale-free network, most people had 1-10 partners, but there were a few that had thousands. The thousands-connections people were the hubs, and supported the network of transmission of STD.

In cell, most molecules participate in only one or two reactions (connections). However, there are some that participate in a large amount, like water and ATP, and those hold the entire network together.

Why? Why do all these networks have same properties even when they have drastically different elements?

Number of nodes in a network are never fixed. Networks continuously expand number of vertices. Internet didn’t pop up, but grew organically. (Is it possible for an original hub to decay and die out? – not if the rich-get-richer rule below is satisfied. A hub dies only through system criticality or environmental change. Left in homeostasis, the hub will continue to expand.)

New nodes do not connect randomly, but they prefer to connect to high-connected nodes. Knowledge is biased to a well-connected node. Preferential attachment is the probability that a node connects to a node with ‘k’ links. The higher ‘k’, the higher the probability. If we want to model a network, we have to incorporate both the growth rule and preferential attachment.

Why scale-free, why hubs? The more-connected node will grow faster than the less-connected node, as a node comes into the network, the more-connected node has a stronger probabilistic gravity on it.

Gene-duplication – error in the copy. Occasionally the gene will be copied twice.

If you are a very highly connected protein, there is a great chance that someone you are connected to will duplicate. When that happens, you will then be connected to two instead of one, and your connectivity will grow.

This is how scale-free networks emerge in all organisms.

What are the consequences?

One place where it does matter is robustness. Complex systems are very good at maintaining basic functions if one of their components break down; they have an amazing capacity to function in the face of many errors. Every network has a critical point for a random network, after which it will break apart. In a scale-free network, if you take a very large scale-free network, you can remove 80 percent of the nodes randomly and remaining 20 percent still talk to each other.

However, it has an Achilles heel. It is very robust against random error, but it is very fragile to attacks (where the largest node, second largest node, etc. is taken out). That is how you destroy them.

Highly connected nodes are more essential, and therefore their removal is more lethal.
Implication: Killing terrorists is like a random removal of nodes. The network will be very robust and be able to handle a large-scale removal of this type (up to about 80 percent). However, if a targeted attack on the top nodes began, the network would fall apart very quickly.

Networks are fundamentally formed of modules, groups of nodes that connect very tightly together, and some links between them. Social networks are great examples of this. Links within modules much denser than links between modules. How could you have hubs that connect to everybody and also have modularity?

Clustering coefficient tells how well the node connected to 'me' knows the other nodes that connect to 'me'. For hub, clustering coefficient is small because you are connected to groups that do not know each other. Hierarchy of clustering coefficient is present in biological and social networks.

Small nodes have high clustering coefficient, hubs have low clustering coefficient. Communications patterns should give you the information on which are hubs, and which are modules with high-clustering coefficients?

What about the strength of connections? How are they distributed, and how do they affect network structure? Strength of reaction is flux of reaction, how many molecules are produced. Blue is cold, red is hot. Function of: How many messages sent, how many times connections are used. Majority of connections are are weak, a few are strong. You have a few friends you see often, many friends you see rarely. If you want to gain information about job opportunities, you have to reach out to weak lengths because they will be connected to other nodes you don’t know about.

How do we look at the way the cell is adapting to different environments. You have a different connective pattern during summer, as during school year. If you change environment, then the fluxes will change. Flux elasticity, you have certain reactions that turn on, and certain that turn off. In this way we must take into account connective potential in addition to real-time connections.

Is there any reaction that has to be active no matter what environment the network is in. There is indeed a “core”, a group of reactions that will always be active no matter where you put them. In a random network the number of reactions that are always on should approach zero as you increase the number of environments. In reality, there is a saturation, which means that a core-group develops.

The larger the network, the smaller the core, a collective network effect.

Universality of networks at highest organizational abstraction -- topologically they behave the same.

Universality decreases as organism specificity increases (the differences between WWW, Cell, etc. -- properties that are specific to an organism cannot be universal). The way information is stored is specific (DNA, bits, etc.), the way it is processed is shared (topological network properties are universal).

The Strategic Implications of the BP Turn Off -- A Thought Experiment

This just in:

BP, based in Britain, said late on Sunday that it had begun closing the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska after discovering a small pipeline spill in a move that will slash production by 400,000 barrels per day.

Firstly, is it possible that we purposefully turned off a large supply of oil from oil fields we control?

Well, we know an Iran-related turn off would shock the system with Surprise and Uncertainty.

But why is that important?

Surprise causes the market to become reactionary, and uncertainty increases entropy.

What do you mean, entropy?

Entropy in the sense of unpredictability. Markets thrive on foresight, and uncertainty clouds their vision. This lessens their intelligence (which is a function of the amount and accuracy of information), and they become vulnerable to vast fluctuations.

Why do they become so vulnerable?

Because confidence in predictability provides stability, and if you remove it, the system becomes unstable. We're dealing with human beings with inadequate knowledge reacting to false positives with positive feedback. It makes things unstable and vulnerable to phase shift.

What do you mean, phase shift?

The phase shift happens when the state of the system gets close to an attractor placed on a critical point. This critical point is the boundary where the state of the system, steadily being one thing, shifts directions and starts becoming something else. It's where solid becomes liquid, and it's where a system can crash. If the stock market fluctuates too far in basic commodities, commodities that hold the whole system together, then the point of criticality could be crossed and we could experience a massive flight of capital.

Like another Great Depression?

Which would then throw entropy into our everday lives, which would cause stress on our society, etc. Nobody's lived through "potential great depression of 2006" yet. Economists will try to tell you what will happen, but what they are really telling you is what has happened. Economics, like history, is a social science, capable of coughing up guiding patterns and analogies, but completely resistant to an overall ideology. The meta-ideology of pragmatism works most often, but even that has shortcomings, because sometimes things depend on being non-pragmatic. The point is that there is no formula economists can use to plug in today and derive a firm answer on what it means. And the accuracy of their analysis drops as entropy rises. The more uncertain things are, the less data mean what they "normally" mean. The more predictions that are falsified, and the greater the frequency, the higher the stress on those who move the market. The higher the stress, the greater the vulnerability.

So how does today's BP turn off fit in?

Here's how it would go. We give the system a manageable amount of hurt (8%) and the certainty of coming back online on a specific date; this allows the system to account for it and plan around it, which lowers the Uncertainty, provides Information, and holds steady the Confidence of the market. We get out ahead of any future Iran-related disruption, and provide the market with a palliative to muffle the dissonance of war. Simply: we play a card to preempt this shock, and, under cover of a manageable supply shortage, publicly declare that we have opened the strategic reserve.

And think about it: a small leak is certainly the type of excuse you could manufacture and cover up.

But why do all this to turn on the strategic reserve?

Because once the strategic reserve is on, this country is prepared to wage war. (you must read all of this):

Obviously, it would be impossible to develop a universal drawdown policy that would effectively respond to every potential oil crisis, but a set of public guidelines for multilateral action are essential. Each country has its own national drawdown policy. Each country, if not each politician within a country, moreover, has its own definition of crisis and response. The CERM provide for multilateral consultation by the 26 members of the IEA so that a coordinated, multi-lateral draw down of the members’ combined strategic reserves may take place. This consultation process, however, does not provide any hints to the marketplace or road map to the policymaker as to how and when multilateral market intervention might take place.

Market intervention is a contentious issue. Indeed, any oil disruption results in a difficult dilemma. On one hand, the price mechanism may be left alone to reallocate supplies, but a period of high prices must be endured in the interim. On the other hand, strategic oil reserves may be used to replace lost supplies and lower prices, but then the price mechanism may be short-circuited in a manner that prevents or delays the most efficient allocation of resources, leaving pockets of high prices at the end of the supply chain. The policymaker is caught between two less than optimal outcomes. Strategic reserves represent a blunt instrument whose use may spawn unintended and unwanted consequences even as they lower benchmark prices. Oil prices, however, do not manage crises; they measure crises. Excessive reliance on the market during a major oil disruption is tantamount to rolling the dice on the global economy.

War with Iran would cause a major oil disruption. We could be adjusting in advance.

So we're preparing for war?

We could be. If we are, the strategic reserve would be an important step. And this way it doesn’t cause stress on public perception and doesn’t tip our hand to the Iranians.

Why not just open the Strategic Reserve?

Besides tipping our hand? Well, that's the alternative to the conspiracy theory. But there is one hiccup in that theory, too.

What's that?

We wouldn't start drawing from our strategic reserve as a first resort:

The Gulf War was another test of emergency preparedness. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent cessation of production by both countries seemed a textbook opportunity for the use of strategic stocks. Crude oil prices doubled between the third and fourth quarters of 1990 even though Saudi Arabia and other countries immediately increased production in a market that was already very well supplied prior to the August 2 invasion. The IEA, however, did not draw down strategic reserves until January 1991 and then only as a complement to the start of the air war over Iraq. The Contingency Plan used was designed to increase “supplies” by as much as 2.5 million b/d. Stock draw would account for 1.9 million b/d of the total. The remaining 600,000 b/d would include demand restraint, fuel switching and increased production. Of the 2.5 million b/d plan, however, only about 1.3 to 1.4 million b/d of the additional supply ever made it to the market. The quick and successful military campaign and the immediate and dramatic decline in prices encouraged some countries not to implement their share of the plan. In the countries where stocks were put into the market, company interest was limited.

Historically (i.e. before Clinton), it took much more than this kind of price pressure to open the Strategic Reserve. So it is unlikely that the opening of the reserve is in response to BP and the current level of conflict in the Middle East. The only ways it makes sense are if we are using the BP issue to take away Iran's best card in anticipation of war, or if we created the issue to take away Iran's best card in anticipation of war.

It's possible that we have issued our intentions to the Iranians, and they called us on it, saying, “Come and git me, Coppah.” If so, we will soon find out because very shortly other signs of mobilization will appear. We would see further rearrangement of assets until we were right on their doorstep, ready to do battle. And it would be methodical. Every step of the mobilization would be taken with two things in mind: public perception, and tactical reality.

Of course, the obverse of this theory is that Iran struck the pipeline as one of the twenty-two pressure points they identified. That would mean they have started to implement their plan. Which would mean certain war. But I don't think that happened.

So even if the conspiracy theory is wrong, which is likely, you think war is inevitable?

No. Not inevitable. Iran will get to make that choice. As we conspicuously ready our power, the question is:

Will she sit, strike, or surrender?

Kissinger on Iran

His article in the Washington Post, here. Excerpt:

Diplomacy never operates in a vacuum. It persuades not by the eloquence of its practitioners but by assembling a balance of incentives and risks. Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means defines both the challenge and the limits of diplomacy. War can impose submission; diplomacy needs to evoke consensus. Military success enables the victor in war to prescribe, at least for an interim period. Diplomatic success occurs when the principal parties are substantially satisfied; it creates -- or should strive to create -- common purposes, at least regarding the subject matter of the negotiation; otherwise no agreement lasts very long. The risk of war lies in exceeding objective limits; the bane of diplomacy is to substitute process for purpose. Diplomacy should not be confused with glibness. It is not an oratorical but a conceptual exercise. When it postures for domestic audiences, radical challenges are encouraged rather than overcome.

It is often asserted that what is needed in relation to Iran is a diplomacy comparable to that which, in the 1970s, moved China from hostility to cooperation with the United States. But China was not persuaded by skillful diplomacy to enter this process. Rather, China was brought, by a decade of escalating conflict with the Soviet Union, to a conviction that the threat to its security came less from capitalist America than from the growing concentration of Soviet forces on its northern borders. Clashes of Soviet and Chinese military forces along the Ussuri River accelerated Beijing's retreat from the Soviet alliance.

The contribution of American diplomacy was to understand the significance of these events and to act on that knowledge. The Nixon administration did not convince China that it needed to change its priorities. Its role was to convince China that implementing its strategic necessities was safe and would enhance China's long-term prospects. It did so by concentrating the diplomatic dialogue on fundamental geopolitical objectives, while keeping some contentious items in abeyance. The Shanghai Communique of 1972, the first Sino-U.S. communique, symbolized this process. Contrary to established usage, it listed a series of continuing disagreements as a prelude to the key common objective of preventing hegemonic aspirations of unnamed third parties -- clearly implying the Soviet Union.

The challenge of the Iranian negotiation is far more complex. For two years before the opening to China, the two sides had engaged in subtle, reciprocal, symbolic and diplomatic actions to convey their intentions. In the process, they had tacitly achieved a parallel understanding of the international situation, and China opted for seeking to live in a cooperative world.

Nothing like that has occurred between Iran and the United States. There is not even an approximation of a comparable world view. Iran has reacted to the American offer to enter negotiations with taunts, and has inflamed tensions in the region. Even if the Hezbollah raids from Lebanon into Israel and the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers were not planned in Tehran, they would not have occurred had their perpetrators thought them inconsistent with Iranian strategy. In short, Iran has not yet made the choice of the world it seeks -- or it has made the wrong choice from the point of view of international stability. The crisis in Lebanon could mark a watershed if it confers a sense of urgency to the diplomacy of the Six and a note of realism to the attitudes in Tehran.

Up to now Iran has been playing for time. The mullahs apparently seek to accumulate as much nuclear capability as possible so that, even were they to suspend enrichment, they would be in a position to use the threat of resuming their weapons effort as a means to enhance their clout in the region.

Given the pace of technology, patience can easily turn into evasion. The Six will have to decide how serious they will be in insisting on their convictions. Specifically, the Six will have to be prepared to act decisively before the process of technology makes the objective of stopping uranium enrichment irrelevant. Well before that point is reached, sanctions will have to be agreed on. To be effective, they must be comprehensive; halfhearted, symbolic measures combine the disadvantage of every course of action. Interallied consultations must avoid the hesitation that the League of Nations conveyed over Abyssinia. We must learn from the North Korean negotiations not to engage in a process involving long pauses to settle disagreements within the administration and within the negotiating group, while the other side adds to its nuclear potential. There is equal need, on the part of America's partners, for decisions permitting them to pursue a parallel course.

A suspension of enrichment of uranium should not be the end of the process. A next step should be the elaboration of a global system of nuclear enrichment to take place in designated centers around the world under international control -- as proposed for Iran by Russia. This would ease implications of discrimination against Iran and establish a pattern for the development of nuclear energy without a crisis with each entrant into the nuclear field.

President Bush has announced America's willingness to participate in the discussions of the Six with Iran to prevent emergence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. But it will not be possible to draw a line between nuclear negotiations and a comprehensive review of Iran's overall relations to the rest of the world.

The legacy of the hostage crisis, the decades of isolation and the messianic aspect of the Iranian regime represent huge obstacles to such a diplomacy. If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America -- and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six -- is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.

At the same time, an Iran concentrating on the development of the talents of its people and the resources of its country should have nothing to fear from the United States. Hard as it is to imagine that Iran, under its present president, will participate in an effort that would require it to abandon its terrorist activities or its support for such instruments as Hezbollah, the recognition of this fact should emerge from the process of negotiation rather than being the basis for a refusal to negotiate. Such an approach would imply the redefinition of the objective of regime change, providing an opportunity for a genuine change in direction by Iran, whoever is in power.

It is important to express such a policy in precise objectives capable of transparent verification. A geopolitical dialogue is not a substitute for an early solution of the nuclear enrichment crisis. That must be addressed separately, rapidly and firmly. But a great deal depends on whether a strong stand on that issue is understood as the first step in the broader invitation to Iran to return to the wider world.

In the end, the United States must be prepared to vindicate its efforts to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program. For that reason, America has an obligation to explore every honorable alternative.

As I wrote before, Bush has made up his mind on the question of Iranian nukes. The Administration's efforts to "explore every honorable alternative" has caused many to believe that it doesn't have an Iran policy at all, which is ridiculous. Bush's words have been clear, and his stance has been unwavering. In the end, one way or another, it will be vindicated. Believe it.

Lessons of Diplomacy, Wilsonianism

"In America's view, it was not self-determination which caused wars but the lack of it; no the absence of a balance of power that produced instability but the pursuit of it. Wilson proposed to found peace on the principle of collective security. In his view and that of all his disciples, the security of the world called for, not hte defense of the national interest, but of peace as a legal concept."

"Never before had such revolutionary goals been put forward with so few guidelines as to how to implement them."

"Wilson was surely right about the European nations' having made a mess of things. However, it was not so much the balance of power as Europe's abdication of it that had caused the debacle of the World War I. The leaders of pre-WWI Europe had neglected the historic balance of power and abandoned the periodic adjustments which had avoided final showdowns. They had substituted a bipolar world much less flexible than even the Cold War world of the future, in that it lacked the cataclysmic inhibitions of the Nuclear Age. While paying lip service to equilibrium, the leaders of Europe had catered to the most nationalistic elements of their public opinion. Neither their political nor their military arrangements allowed for flexibility; there was no safety valve between the status quo and conflagration. This had led to crises that could not be settled and to endless public posturing that, in the end, permitted no retreat."

"Wilson was proposing a world order in which resistance to aggression would be based on moral rather than geopolitical judgments. Wilson rejected the notion that international conflict had structural causes. Deeming harmony to be natural, Wilson strove for institutions which would sweep away the illusion of clashing interests and permit the underlying sense of world community to assert itself."

"In essence, Wilson's ideas translated into institutions tantamount to world government, which the American people were even less prepared to accept than a global police force."

"The Treaty of Versailles was too onerous for conciliation but not severe enough for permanent subjugation."

"The price for conducting foreign policy on the basis of abstract principles is the impossibility of distinguishing among individual cases."

"The gravest psychological blight on the Treaty was Article 231, the so-called War Guilt clause. Eighteenth-century peacemakers would have regarded "war guilt clauses" as absurd. For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests. In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds."

"The purpose of an alliance is to produce an obligation more predictable and precise than an analysis of national interest. Collective security works in the exact opposite way. It leaves the application of its principles to the interpretation of particular circumstances when they arise, unintentionally putting a large premium on the mood of the moment and, hence, on national self-will."

"Collective security contributes to security only if all nations--or at least all nations relevant to collective defense--share nearly identical views about the nature of the challenge and are prepared to use force or apply sanctions on the "merits" of the case, regardless of the specific national interest they may have in the issues at hand. Only if these conditions are fulfilled can a world organization devise sanctions or act as an arbiter of international affairs."

"It is in the nature of prophets to redouble their efforts, not to abandon them, in the face of a recalcitrant reality."

"In the end, collective security fell prey to the weakness of its central premise--that all nations have the same interest in resisting a particular act of aggression and are prepared to run identical risks in opposing it. Experience has shown these assumptions to be false. No act of aggression involving a major power has ever been defeated by applying the principle of collective security. Either the world community has refused to assess the act as one which constituted aggression, or it has disagreed over the appropriate sanctions. And when sanctions were applied, they inevitably reflected the lowest common denominator, often proving so ineffetual that they did more harm than good."

"Nothing remotely resembling the Soviet Union had appeared on the horizon of European diplomacy since the French Revolution. For the first time in over a century, a country had dedicated itself officially to overthrowing the established order."

"A nation defeated in war and partially occupied by foreign troops has basically two choices. It can challenge the victor in the hope of making enforcement of the peace too painful; or it can cooperate with the victor while regaining strength for a later confrontation. Both strategies contain risks. After a military defeat, resistance invites a test of strength at the moment of maximum weakness; collaboration risks demoralization, because policies which appeal to the victor also tend to confuse the public opinion of the vanquised."

"In the nineteenth century, agreements were never justified by the "atmosphere" they generated, and the concessions were never made to sustain individual leaders in office. Nor did leaders address each other by their first names as a way of underlining their good relations with each other for the sake of their public's opinions. Since then, the trend toward personalizing relations has accelerated."

"Confused leaders have a tendency to substitute public relations maneuvers for a sense of direction."

"Finally, a mechanism was devised for doing nothing at all. It took the form of a fact-finding mission--the standard device for diplomats signaling that inaction is the desired outcome. Such commissions take time to assemble, to undertake studies, and to reach a consensus--by which point, with luck, the problem might even have gone away."

"Statesmen always face the dilemma that, when their scope for action is greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge. By the time they have garnered sufficient knowledge, the scope for decisive action is likely to have vanished. In the 1930's, British leaders were too unsure of Hitler's objectives and French leaders too unsure about themselves to act on the basis of assessments which they could not prove. The tuition fee for learning about Hitler's true nature was tens of millions of graves stretching from one end of Europe to the other."

"The West's obsession with Hitler's motives was, of course, misguided in the first place. The tenets of the balance of power whould have made it clear that a large and strong Germany bordered on the east by small and weak states was a dangerous threat. Realpolitik teaches that, regardless of Hitler's motives, Germany's relations with its neighbors would be determined by their relative power. The West should have spent less time assessing Hitler's motives and more time counterbalancing Germany's growing strength."

"The essence of demagoguery resides in the ability to distill emotion and frustration into a single moment."

"The Western democracies' initial reaction to Hitler's ascendancy was to accelerate their commitment to disarmament."

"What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. Popular literature and films often depict the opposite--policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions."

"Ironically, the Wilsonian approach to international relations, which had facilitated Hitler's advances beyond what any previous European system would have considered acceptable, after a certain point also caused Great Britain to draw the line more rigorously than it would have in a world based on Realpolitik. If Wilsonianism had prevented earlier resistance to Hitler, it also laid the foundation for implacable opposition to him once its moral criteria had been unambiguously violated."

"What had changed beyond Hitler's comprehension was that, once he had crossed the line of what was morally tolerable, the same moral perfectionism which had formerly generated pliability in the democracies transformed itself into unprecedented intransigence."

Lessons of Diplomacy, Cold War Begins

"Roosevelt's policy was a heady mixture of traditional American exceptionalism, Wilsonian idealism, and Roosevelt's own canny insight into the American psyche, which had always been more attuned to universal causes than to calculations of rewards and penalties."

"Ideology reinforced tradition. Stalin defined the requirements of peace in the same way that Russian statesmen had for centuries--as the widest possible security belt around the Soviet Union's vast periphery. In insisting on a free hand vis-a-vis his neighbors, Stalin was following traditional Russian practice."

"After the battle of Stalingrad, Stalin became increasingly certain that the war woudl end with the Soviet Union in possession of most of the terrotories likely to be in dispute. Having less and less to gain from negotiations, Stalin entrusted the shape of the postwar world to the reach of his armies."

"Most other societies would have treated the British pursuit of the national interest as a matter of course. To American leaders, however, it represented a flaw inherent in the British character."

"America's most significant military experiences had been its own Civil War, which had been fought to the finish, and the First World War. Both of which had ended in total victory. In American thinking foreign policy and [war] strategy were compartmentalized into successive phases of national policy. In the ideal American universe, diplomats stayed out of strategy, and military personnel completed their task by the time diplomacy started--a view for which America was to pay dearly in the Korean and Vietnam wars."

"As a general rule, countries striving for stability and equilibrium should do everything within their power to achieve their basic peace terms while still at war. As long as the enemy is in the field, his strength indirectly enhances that of the more peaceful side. If this principle is neglected and the key issues are left unresolved until the peace conference, the most determined power ends up in possession of the prizes and can be dislodged only by a major confrontation."

"Declarations of principle, Stalin said, were like algebra; he preferred practical arithmetic."

"Stalin vastly underestimated the seriousness with which Americans have traditionally approached legal documents. Later, when it decided to organize resistance to Soviet expansionism, America did so on the basis of Stalin's failure to keep his word."

"The theme that the incumbent it the Kremlin was in his heart of hearts a peaceful moderate in need of help in overcoming his intrasigent colleagues was to remain a constant of American discussions ever after, regardless of the Soviet leader."

"Churchill's geopolitical analysis was far more accurate than Roosevelt's. Yet Roosevelt's reluctance to see the world in geopolitical terms was the reverse side of the same idealism which had propelled America into the war and enabled it to preserve the cause of freedom. Had Roosevelt followed Churchill's prescriptions, he would have improved America's bargaining position but might have sacrificed its ability to sustain the confrontations of the Cold War that were still ahead."

Truman: "If the president knows what he wants, no bureaucrat can stop him. A president has to know when to stop taking advice."

"Starting out from an assumption of underlying harmony, Truman ascribed disagreements with the Soviets not to conflicting geopolitical interests but to 'misbehavior' and 'political immaturity.' It was a characteristically American statement."

"The cultural gap between American and Soviet leaders contributed to the emerging Cold War. American negotiators acted as if the mere recitation of their legal and moral rights ought to produce the results they desired. But Stalin needed far more persuasive reasons to change his course."

"Stalin, the master calculator, had miscalculated. For, once Americans' confidence in his good faith had been destroyed, there was to be no easy road back for him. Stalin pressed his position too far because he never really understood the psychology of the democracies, especially America's. The result was the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Alliance, and the Western military buildup, none of which could have been in his game plan."

Lessons of Diplomacy, Containment

"When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk."

"There are some experiments in diplomacy which cannot be tried because failure invites irreversible risk."

Adenauer: "Never confuse energy with strength."

"When Stalin miscalculated...it was because he assumed that his counterparts were also conducting Realpolitik, and in the same cold-blooded fashion as he. These assumptions turned out to be grievously wrong. The United States was not conducting Realpolitik -- at least not as Stalin understood it. To American leaders, moral maxims were real, and legal obligations were meaningful...America resisted these acts of aggression in the name of principle, not in defense of a sphere of interest; America had exerted itself in order to remedy an insult to a universal cause, not over a challenge to the local status quo."

"But Americans perceived it quite differently, as a conflict between good and evil, and as a struggle on behalf of the free world. That interpretation endowed american actions with an enormous drive and dedication. It also caused containment to oscillate from the technical to the apocalyptic. Issues capable of being encapsulated in moral or legal formulae were well and thoughtfully handled; but there was also a tendency to concentrate on the formula rather than on the purpose it was supposed to serve."

"The biggest loser in Korea turned out to be the Soviet Union, the country which American leaders thought had masterminded the whole enterprise. Within two years of the invasion of Korea, America had mobilized its side ofthe global dividing line. The United States tripled its defense expenditures and transformed the Atlantic Alliance from a political coalition into an integrated military organization headed by an American Supreme Commander."

Because of their conviction that peace is normal and goodwill natural, American leaders have generally sought to encourage negotiations by removing elements of coercion and by unilateral demonstrations of goodwill. In fact, in most negotiations, unilateral gestures remove a key negotiating asset. In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered--especially in wartime."

"If the United States dared not win but could not afford to lose, what were its options? When all the general phrases were reduced to specifics, it was stalemate on the battefront and, therefore, at the negotiating table as well."

"In the American government, option papers nearly always urge the middle among three options. Because the foreign policy establishment tends to position its recommendations between the course of doing nothing and the course of general war, experienced bureaucrats know that the morale of their subordinates is enhanced if they pick the middle road."

"America's leaders believed that they had learned the dangers of escalation, but they failed to consider the penalties of stalemate."

"The art of policy is to create a calculation of the risks and rewards that affect the adversary's calculations."

"American leaders have traditionally viewed diplomacy and strategy as being separate activities. In a limited war, if military and political goals are not synchronized from the very beginning, there is always a danger of doing either too much or too little. Doing to much and allowing the military element to predominate erodes the dividing line to all-out war and tempts the adversary to raise the stakes. Doing too little and allowing the diplomatic side to dominate risks submerging the purpose of the war in negotiating tactics and a proclivity to settle for a stalemate."

"That America defends principle, not interests, law, and not power, has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of America's rationale in committing its military forces, from the time of the two world wars through the escalation of its involvement in Vietnam in 1965 and the Gulf War in 1991. Both Moscow and Pyongyang had failed to understand the role of values in America's approach to international relations. They had obviously failed to understand that repeated American declarations proclaiming resistance to communist aggression as a moral duty carried far more weight with American policymakers than strategic analysis."

"Only a society with enormous confidence in its achievements and in its future could have mustered the dedication and the resources to strive for a world order in which defeated enemies would be conciliated, stricken allies restored, and adversaries converted. Great enterprises are often driven by a touch of naivete."

"In the 1920's, isolationism had caused America to withdraw on the ground that it was too good for the world; in the [Henry] Wallace Movement, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world. According to Wallace, America had no right to intervene unilaterally around the globe. Defense was legitimate only with the approval of the United Nations. Wallace manaaged to develop themes which would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War, and move to center stage during the Vietnam War. These emphasized America's moral inadequacies, and htose of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. The new radicalism reaffirmed the historic vision of America as a beacon of liberty, but, in the process, turned it against itself. The very idea of America's having international responsibilities was, in Wallace's eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. Since prejudice, hatred, and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society."

"In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence on practical grounds, while the Administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds."

"A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security."

"Once vital interests had been equated with moral principle, America's strategic objectives were cast in terms of worthiness rather than of power. Ever since, American foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the national interest through crusading moralism."

"Only a country as idealistic, as pioneering, and as relatively inexperienced as the United States could have advanced a plan for global economic recovery based solely on its own resources. And yet the very sweep of that vision elicited a national commitment which would sustain the generation of the Cold War through its final victory."

Some Thoughts

On France:
Mr. Douste-Blazy told reporters yesterday,"In the region, there is of course a country such as Iran — a great country, a great people, and a great civilization, which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region."

There is much gnashing of teeth and grinding of gears over that particular statement right now, and I thought I would explain.

Look, it's not shocking, and it's not dumb. Think about it. If you were France, and you were trying to create a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran, it's naive to think it wouldn't be necessary to meet a certain amount of conditions precedent. Now, that could mean a negatively-reinforced condition as well as any other kind; it does not mean mere appeasing. But you would have to give something if you were asking of your interlocutor what France is asking Iran. Because fundamentally, France is asking Iran to lose face in the international arena, respect and maybe even honor in the domestic one.

It was the Iranians themselves who made this into such a Definitive Issue and Big Deal (and in a very real and worrying sense Iran committed early on to go all the way), and they are not going to give up until it is brought home that the alternative is much, much better.

Right now might be the time that rethinking is going on (with their proxy Hezbollah on the ropes), and if it is, you can be sure that the Western countries know about it. The amount of tension it would take to make the Mullahs really, actually think about giving up their nukes would definitely be enough to register on the radar screens of the West. An "increase" in meetings, perhaps, or irrational behavior. Or maybe if we are good (and sometimes we are), an informant or two on the inside. We can suck up information in an unprecedented number of ways, and move the analysis up at historically breakneck speeds. If the Iranians are getting fidgety, you can be sure we know about it.

And what better way to help that process along than for France to issue this statement? Firstly, she's allowing the Mullahs to make an informed decision: she's helping the rulers feel like rulers who have futures being rulers, and such a message might, just might, sway them at a moment of weakness. And when one complains that the statements are false and condemns them, what must be understood is that the statements are not meant to be true (they aren't true), they are meant to do something. They were said for effect, to affect, and they must be analyzed in that light. Otherwise, we are simply projecting a type of personalized shading on France's very-clearly-diplomatic action.

Secondly, France has set herself up to be the Wink Wink Nod Nod great power, the softer landing into modernity when you can't match the piety of the Great Uncle Sam. While America goes to church at eight in the morning, France is the chick in the bar at the end of the night. She's the girl flaunting her wares and playing to ego, with lipstick on the the rim of her third martini.

And there she is, and it's closing time. She's sort of cute, but she's not as hot as that blond who left an hour ago. Now she was hot. Unfortunately, she was also unattainable.

The bartender calls last call, and you know time is running out. You don't want to do it, but it's just so easy.

[Update: 8-2-06 11:47]
France to boycott talks on international force in Lebanon. I guess Iran couldn't take the hint. So long, Hezbollah, and thanks for all the fish.

[Update 2]
Question: Would France sell out Israel to buy a nuclear free Iran? Would she allow Hezbollah to survive militarily and politically if it bought her a diplomatic coup with the Mullahs?

Of course she would. And it looks like she's been turned down. Iran has decided that nukes are more important than Hezbollah, and will now end up with neither.


On Lebanon (ht Rufus at BC):
If Hezb Allah is totally wiped out, at the expense of Lebanon, I see a bleak future for stability, let alone peace in the Middle East. If Hezb Allah is disarmed and Lebanon left mainly in tact, with wise rehabilitation assistance from the international community, I see a comparatively bright future, though not sunny. Simply and generally put, save Lebanon, save the Middle East.

That agrees with what I wrote here.