Comments on: Deadly knowledge

By: buddy larsen

buddy larsen — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 19:17:59 +0000

I second that by Murphy –in spades.

By: Cannoneer No. 4

Cannoneer No. 4 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:47:26 +0000

The army and marines have been doing the same thing police forces and corporations have been doing for over a decade; taking data from many different sources and quickly sorting out what all the pieces mean. It's called fusion and data mining, and it's a weapon that is having a dramatic impact on what many thought was an unwinnable war. Speed Becomes A Weapon

By: Bob Murphy

Bob Murphy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:05:21 +0000

In these times I quite agree with Heinlein’s in Starship Troopers.
But Fletcher, America was not founded as a democracy but a Republic with all kinds of checks and balances to avoid the kind of democratic/populist thang you speak of.
That is one of the reasons the founding fathers, for instance, made a bicameral Congress where there were two Senators from each state regardless its size or population base.
And I guess that’s the reason we have a President with a direct mandate from voters as head of the Executive Branch rather than a Prime Minister who is selected by his party and is a member of the legislative side of government.
And, of course, that is why we have an explicit Bill of Rights compared with the UK’s Common Law.
And I guess that Bill of Rights might be the main reason we are citizens here and not subjects as in the UK.
Our rights come from God/nature/Tao whatever you want to call it, not from any monarch or government. And they are inalienable rights.
It’s got nothing to do with government giving us anything.
They’ll do as they’re told or we replace them every four years and, if all else fails, we’ve got the 2nd Amendment.

By: Ravalli County News » Blog Archive » A Winning Strategy in Iraq

Ravalli County News » Blog Archive » A Winning Strategy in Iraq — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:01:07 +0000

[...] “The conceptual breakthrough was to realize that winning the information and intelligence war … [...]

By: Fletcher Christian

Fletcher Christian — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:23:46 +0000

Storm Rider; the central problem of democracy is “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” Thomas Jefferson

It simply isn’t true. Some people are inferior to others, by any yardstick one cares to name. And thus people who have no capacity whatsoever to really understand the issues they are voting about have an equal right to those who have; and thus politicians get into power by promising “bread and circuses” or, to put it another way, by bribing the voters with their own money.

I may be paraphrasing this: “No democracy long survives the discovery by the electorate that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.

No, I don’t have an answer to this problem. Perhaps qualification requirements for voting, of which the best I’ve seen is Heinlein’s.

By: Joseph Somsel

Joseph Somsel — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:46:56 +0000

While I have no insider information, the key decision on the Surge was not if, but when.

Bush had long asserted that the US would stand down when the Iraqis stood up. Surging extra troops into Iraqi would have been premature until the Iraqis had a creditable army and a cohesive government willing and able to command it. Once the Iraqis were ready to roll and to hold the reclaimed territory, THEN it was time for us to commit our reserves to a final flushout of A-Q. The two elements of extra US troops AND real Iraqi governance made the Surge work. Prior to that, the US was just keeping a lid on things and attriting fanatical young Muslim fighters.

I think McCain understood this program/timeline and was able to get ahead of it politically and use it to his advantage. A few months before the Surge was ready to roll, he started demanding it publicly, thereby taking credit for prescience and great stategic accuman.

Programmer – your encouragement to work on military R&D by bright young engineers rings true. At the last place I worked, the brightest guy had worked on the human sniffer program for the Viet Nam war. The idea was a machine that could smell humans and so warn our troops when the NVA or VC were hidding in the bushes. He even took it to the field for testing. Today, he is designing the computerized controls for new nuclear power plants.

By: Bob Murphy

Bob Murphy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:16:57 +0000

@DWMF
A few weeks ago, I bought some DVD packs of the TV series “The Wire”. It seems to me that the Army have developed advanced police techniques to analyze and listen in to gang networks. Like the TV series, but more advanced, especially in analysis and interpretation of the data.

Will these methodologies be given to the police back home too, I wonder?

And whether they can use the Army’s other systems to neutralize the targets?:) The Hand of Allah speaks to street gangs? Just kidding, guys (and Nahncee).

By: Bob Murphy

Bob Murphy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:04:34 +0000

@RWE-Neat yarn!
I spoke to some old Luftwaffe fighter aces who were all full Colonels in the new Luftwaffe in the mid 1960s. They all spoke good English because they had been trained to fly their new jets in the US.
One told me he was sure they were doomed when the Yanks dropped their camouflage paint jobs and started to polish up their planes to a nice silver.
The USAAF pilots wanted old Kamerade to see them so they would come up to fight.
Heheheheheh. I loves that old American attitude. And the 1,000 bomber raids. No other country could do it. Rich, strong, young, confident and the product of the best system in the world (if not the neatest).
All maybe helped by the fact that the leftist chattering classes were on Sam’s side for once, after the Germans invaded their spiritual homeland.

By: Annoy Mouse

Annoy Mouse — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:45:43 +0000

Check out the technology and forces employed in the book by Mark Bowden “Killing Pablo”. Pablo was killed in 1993 by a Columbian strike force that worked in conjunction with a joint operations group. Imagine Centra Spike after a decade of refinement, intell, spec ops, law enforcement, and a crazed militia that scared the crap out of the narco terrorists, Los Pepes working in a plausibly deniable alliance. This was all done covert. Imagine how that works in open warfare.

By: Bob Hawkins

Bob Hawkins — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:23:27 +0000

I’m tempted to say, “Congratulations, Mr. Woodward, you have discovered the principle of the Objective.”

As far as I can tell, the “new weapon” is: systematically bringing all possible force to bear on the objective of destroying the command structure and high-value assets of the enemy.

The fruits of social science research, and electronic data collection and reporting, allowed this principle to be applied comprehensively even to a diffused target. That’s the big news: something like the kind of concentration of force that an armored corps can put on an opposing armored corps, can now be put on a terrorist/guerrilla force by fast-reacting infantry and special forces. Think about that for a minute.

The Surge was the knockout blow, but it was just part of “all possible force,” set up by the numerous jabs and combinations that preceded it.