First one (that I know of) is out:
http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=691269
According to my publisher, Xlibris, “users can access content on the iPhone/iPod touch via the Stanza app.”
BooksOnBoard has it available as an Adobe ePub and in MobiPocket.
Compare what we got out of our Middle Eastern adventure (not forgetting to include its $3-5 trillion opportunity cost) to what the Chinese are doing in Africa in the meantime:
All across the continent, Chinese companies are signing deals that dwarf the old railroad project. The most heavily reported involve oil production; since the turn of the millennium, Chinese companies have muscled in on lucrative oil markets in places like Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, and Sudan. But oil is neither the largest nor the fastest-growing part of the story. Chinese firms are striking giant mining deals in places like Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and building what is being touted as the world’s largest iron mine in Gabon. They are prospecting for land on which to build huge agribusinesses. And to get these minerals and crops to market, they are building major new ports and thousands of miles of highway.
Howard W. French, The Next Empire, in the May 2010 Atlantic Magazine.
Boyd first used the term in his briefing “New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat,” which he completed in August 1976. He defined them in terms of the ability to “both lose energy and gain energy more quickly while outturning an adversary.” (18) The significance of this statement was that until about the late 1960s, fighter aircraft designers had concentrated on the ability to gain energy — fly higher and faster, for example — but not to lose it. Boyd was suggesting that you needed both, and more important, the ability to transit between the two states quickly.
Fine, but limited, it would appear, to dogfighting — air-to-air combat with short-range weapons.
But on the next chart, he began to generalize: “The idea of fast transients suggests that in order to win or gain superiority, we should operate at a faster tempo than our adversaries or inside our adversaries’ time scales.” He concluded that if we can do this, we will appear ambiguous to our adversaries and “thereby generate confusion and disorder.”
Confusion and disorder. Wow. Between these two charts, Boyd has somehow transitioned from the Red Baron to a theory of combat, if not conflict, from the mathematical to the psychological, from engineering to strategy.
He concludes with “He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives,” in air-to-air combat and in waging war.
There are still plenty of unanswered questions, of which the most important is what does “quickest rate of change” mean if you’re not in air-to-air combat, where Boyd gives a precise definition?
However, even at this point, Boyd has uncovered the essence of what he would later call “operating inside the OODA loop,” and it wouldn’t be too much to say that the next 11 years, which took him through Patterns of Conflict, Strategic Game and Organic Design, were elaborations of this basic theme.
As told by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to the cadets of the US Air Force Academy on April 2, 2010:
http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1443
Scroll down about half way. The “to be or to do” speech is a few paragraphs before the end.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am that John is finally receiving recognition from the Defense Establishment. Now you may think it’s pushing things a little to call Bob Gates a member of the defense establishment, and perhaps you’re right, considering that he spent nearly his entire career as an intelligence professional. But he’s been SECDEF for going on four years now and was also an Air Force officer, commissioned from OTS in 1967. That ought to do it.
I think John would be delighted, also, although (curmudgeon that he was) he’d try to hide it.
My old blog at chetrichards.com got badly hacked. As soon as we discovered it, we deleted the blog software. It was a WordPress blog hosted in a Network Solutions site. NS has had security problems before — you may recall that DNI was operated the same way and with the same results — and they may be having them again.
In any case, welcome to the new blog! We’ll be moving documents over from the old site, but not, alas, the posts, which are gone forever.
The posts below are the exceptions. They were moved from chetrichards.com in order to help build this blog. Gina, in case you’re wondering, is the site’s designer.
but …
Maybe someday — recommend them anyway:
1. Pat Lang’s Devereux novels, The Butcher’s Cleaver, followed by Death Piled Hard. Confederate secret agents in DC and Richmond. Pat is a career intel pro — ran DoD’s human intelligence operations for a while — and he also turned out to be a great story teller.
2. The Rules of Victory, by James Gimian and Barry Boyce. An in-depth look at the foundations of the strategic thread that led to Boyd. Essential reading if you want to understand where Boyd is going. This is deep stuff, and I recommend it only to people who have a strong working knowledge of the Sun Tzu text and have at least skimmed the Demna translation, upon which this book is based.
3. The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. The grandfather of spy novels and still one of the best. Like Colombian coffee — rich, satisfying, and meant to be savored.
4. Counterclockwise, by Ellen Langer. Professor Langer, of the Psychology Dept. at Harvard, describes research she and her colleagues have done on what she calls “mindfulness” and what Boyd called “orientation.”
From an article on CNN.com today:
The Mexican cartels, the report says, are “the single greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States.” The Mexican organizations have operations in every region of the United States and are expanding into more rural and suburban areas. … They’ve also stepped up cooperation with U.S. street and prison gangs for distribution.
According to Michael T. Walther, director of the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, which produced the report. “The economic cost alone is estimated at nearly $215 billion annually.”
Note that this compares with the annual direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So while we’re off in those places, guess what’s happening in our own back yard.
More than 2,500 people were killed in drug-related violence in Ciudad Juarez (across the Rio Grande River from El Paso) last year. That’s in one city, right across our border, and only the murders we know about.
With this amount of money at stake, and with the level of violence that the Mexican drug cartels routinely employ, we might rephrase the National Drug Threat Assessment 2010 report’s conclusion as:
The Mexican cartels, the report says, are “the single greatest threat to the United States.”
We have to choose where to use our limited resources, and our survival as a free and democratic country rests upon our choosing wisely.
By fishing around on the Apple Support site, I finally found an article that addressed my problem. It turns out that I needed to delete the SC folder and restart the computer. Wonder why I didn’t think of that? By the way, this isn’t just a Mac thing — the article has instructions for how to do it in Vista.
It worked like a charm, which is good. But somehow the whole process reminds me of what we all had to go through with Microsoft circa 1995.
According to a story on BBC.com, the radar observatory at Arecibo may have to cancel its mission to observe the asteroid Apophis.
Times are tough, I hear you say. And indeed they are.
But there’s significance here, over and above interesting data on a 300 meter wide rock, with a mass of 27 million tons, hurtling through space. The first is that Apophis stands a small chance of striking the earth. How small? Well, that’s what the mission is, or perhaps “was,” supposed to determine. And Arecibo, in Puerto Rico, is the only telescope that can make that determination.
What if Apophis does hit the earth? It’s only 300 m wide, after all. We can already calculate that it will come within 18,300 miles of us in 2036, but an uncertainty of only a few hundred meters could, given the complexities of gravitational mechanics, solar winds, and unknown objects in space, mean the difference between hitting or missing. That’s what Arecibo could determine when the asteroid makes a flyby in January 2013.
What if it hit? The object that caused the Tunguska event in 1908 has been estimated at a few tens of meters across. The resulting blast over Siberia was roughly equivalent to a decent sized nuke (10-15 megatons). An asteroid like Apophis would likely produce a much larger effect. It would obliterate any city it landed near and could cause tsunamis if it struck in the ocean.
Low probability stuff, no doubt, but possible. What would it cost to have Arecibo find out? Brace yourself: $2-3 million. That’s “million” with an “m,” roughly what we spend in 20 minutes in Iraq alone. Unfortunately, the National Science Foundation doesn’t have the money for the mission. In fact, it’s cutting Arecibo’s overall budget by about 25%, which leaves just enough to keep the observatory running.
Point is that actions have consequences, and this small incident shows how we are beginning to feel the consequences of spending $3-5 trillion (Bilmes-Stiglitz estimate) on eradicating non-existent WMDs in Iraq and hounding rag-tag Taliban light infantry in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. May be worth doing, but as the late Milton Friedman loved to point out, there’s no free lunch. Actions have consequences, and costs.
Slightly East of New 