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Harvard Law professor, Charles J. Ogletree Jr. on his former protege:
“He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts.”

Major Donald E. Vandergriff (US army retired) - see previous posts (1, 2) - describes a model for educating adaptive leaders, with the aim of producing a student that can demonstrate an ability to:

Rapidly distinguish between information that is useful in making decisions and that which is not pertinent
Avoid the natural temptation to delay their [...]

For the authors of the draft field manual on Fourth Generation War (William Lind et al), 4GW is fuelled by the rising importance of non-state entities and the declining powers of the state. And states cannot win these wars unless they learn to behave like the clans that oppose them.
4GW is not novel, but a [...]

What’s a single issue NGO to do in a multi-issue world? It’s no easy balancing act.
On one hand, funding departments argue that members want to see them campaigning on the issues they’re known for. Too much scope creep, they say, could lead to falling subscriptions, legacies and income. (Sometimes, members are in fact [...]

Slate on the YouTube defense…

Not sure why the decision has been taken to split the Home Office into two. Perhaps it’s about disaggregating incompatible personality types - dividing the Accountants of Justice from the Warriors for National Survival…

Jimmy Carter’s NSA Zbigniew Brzezinski makes a strong critique in the Washington Post of the way the ‘war on terror’ has been framed. He writes:
The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own — and can become demoralizing… We are [...]

Wired has a story about a new technology being rolled out with the Police in Oakland, California: microphones have been dotted around a rough neighbourhood, and when they pick up the sound of a gunshot, they immediately triangulate its exact location and route the information through to laptops in police cars, where the information is [...]

Since June last year, a Javanese village has been subjected to a belching mud volcano producing 130,000 cubic metres of toxic mud a day. Thought to have been caused by gas exploration rupturing a pressurised aquifer underground, the mud flow has so far submerged 12 villages and displaced 15,000 people, and shows no sign [...]

In 2003, I wrote ‘A Long Peace’, a pamphlet on Northern Ireland with Unionist politician Trevor Ringland and nationalist writer Mick Fealty (founder of Slugger O’Toole). At the time we wrote that:

British and Irish governments are braced for a scenario where the DUP and Sinn Fein eventually emerge as Northern Ireland’s two largest political parties. [...]

In the US, presidential candidates are struggling to get hip with the MySpace generation. ValueWiki has lots of links and a question:
How will the web audience respond to these Web 2.0 methods of campaigning. Will MySpace video blogs from aging U.S. senators be regarded with cynicism?

George Monbiot has a piece in today’s Guardian calling for a five year ban on biofuels. He writes:
In 2004 I warned, on these pages, that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in [...]

In 1953, during the Korean War, Ed Schein was ordered to Travis Air Force Base to interview returning prisoners of war, some of whom were thought to have collaborated with their Chinese captors and come to believe in the superiority of the Chinese communist system.
Chinese tactics were to encourage POWs into minor examples of disloyalty [...]

The days when a whole country watched the same programme at the same time are long gone - much to the chagrin of television executives. But there’s a compensation - thanks to YouTube. With a viral polemic, you get an international debate around a series of virtual water coolers.
The Great Global Warming Swindle exploits this [...]

Retired US army major, Donald Vandergiff (see last week’s post), asks “seven key questions that need to be answered in order to solve the problem of how to create leaders who can deal with the future of warfare.”

What is an adaptive leader?
What traits must he or she possess?
Can those traits be quantified?
What conditions have to [...]

Back in 1989, William Lind and co-authors wondered how terrorists could metamorphose from an irritant into 4th generation warriors. Three elements were needed they thought:

A non-national or transnational base, such as an ideology or religion… A direct attack on [their] enemy’s culture… Highly sophisticated psychological warfare, especially through manipulation of the media, particularly television news.

Bin [...]

Tory MP, Douglas Carswell has been in Afghanistan. He’s come back optimistic, but believes the war-on-drugs is interfering with the war-on-terror:
We are winning precisely because we are fighting the Taliban with “hearts and minds”, not just militarily might. Success hinges on not driving the locals into supporting the enemy. Yet this is precisely what poppy [...]

Another weekly slice of excellence from the great William Lind. This week: why “good decisions are far more often a product of informal conversations than of any formal meeting, briefing or process.”

History offers a useful illustration. In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic [...]

Amidst the predictable froth about ’strategic plans’, ‘program evaluations’, ’senior reviews’ and ‘departmental performance plans’ in the US State Dept’s 2006 Performance and Accountability Report, there are a few small gems.
One of the more eyebrow-raising is the table starting on page 71 that sets out State’s own evaluation of how it’s doing on a range [...]

“The ice is melting. The sea is rising. Hurricanes are blowing. And it’s all your fault. Scared? Don’t be. It’s not true.”

You didn’t need to see Channel 4’s hatchet job on climate change to have an opinion on it. (David Miliband: “I didn’t see the programme, but I promise you I will do a blog [...]

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