I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University. William F. Buckley.

The US Defense Department has a very strange approach to how it generates innovation.  It, in stark contrast to the commercial world, thinks that innovation in warfare can only occur through the work of PhDs.  To wit:  People with these titles get the highest rates of pay afforded DoD consultants and almost all projects that attempt innovation or new thought require a PhD on the leadership team.  As a result of this prominence, DoD affiliated PhDs have grown like mushrooms:  in addition to the plethora of PhDs firmly entrenched within the military education system and the thousands of PhDs at the pointy end of defense contractor blood funnels, there are generously funded relationships with thousands of PhDs rented by hundreds of universities and colleges.

Really?

To those of us in the commercial world, this situation is completely hilarious.  Not only are entrepreneurs and innovators with PhDs are extremely rare, they are often hired into innovative firms at compensation rates much lower than those with proven track records of commercial performance or innovation.  In short, in the real world, ability trumps the title every time.   I suspect the reason why this occurs in the commercial world is that in most cases within innovative companies, you don't have the luxury of failure over the short to medium term.  The checks don't keep rolling in even if you are slow, wrong, or rigid.  

The other reason, and this explains the innovation gap, is that most commercial innovation requires an ability to: synthesize strands of complex analysis that span multiple fields of endeavor, plow through ambiguous or messy data in real-time without pause, and flexibly respond to rapidly changing events.  In short, everything a PhD is trained NOT to do, at risk of professional suicide.

The Innovation Gap

It's is important to point out, after my diatribe above, that much of what could be termed military innovation is an intensely intellectual exercise.  It requires sharp minds.  However, the point is that it never has nor will ever be found in an ivory tower.  This type of intellectual product is produced by entrepreneurial minds that breathe synthesis and exhale flexibility.  

This inevitably yields the following:  given that the DoD is, for all intents and purposes, and ivory tower when it comes to military innovation, all new and innovative military thought will occur outside of it.   While this deficit of innovation can be papered over during times of plenty with an endless supply of financing, it won't last once those dollars slow to a trickle (and they will).  It also won't survive a true opponent armed with the right innovation, which is occurring. 

The rise of the nation-state after the treaties of Westphalia was a long process of subordination:  long standing loyalties to tribe, religion, clan, family, and ethnicity were violently replaced by a loyalty to the nation-state.  However, that process appears to be going into reverse (see The US, Globalization, and the Red Queen).   More interestingly, at a general theoretical level, it appears that loyalty to the nation-state is in inexorable decline due to globalization.

The question is whether the violence at FT Hood is an example of this trend line or not?  Details of the case that show conflicted loyalties, and the eventual subordination of loyalty to the US to religious and ethnic loyalties, seem to be fairly clear.  On the other hand it could just be a one-off 'postal' employee.  Just another alienated, isolated, and enraged man bent on revenge for perceived injustice/slights.

What do you think?    

Some items of interest:

• Vinay Gupta makes some interesting observations on how John Boyd's OODA loop applies to bureaucracy (more accurately, why it doesn't apply).
• CEPR:  Increased defense spending since 9/11 has cost the US the loss of two million jobs.  This is classic Paul Kennedy.
• Software for selecting systempunkts (the points in a complex network that, if attacked, would cause the greatest damage).  CARVER (offensive targeting system designed for the military) software.  Download it from the FDA (food and drug administration).   They've added SHOCK, which is aimed at measuring the health, psychological, and economic impact of systems disruption.  Here's a brochure on the software.  More on CARVER methodology per Janes.  It would be interesting to open source this software's development process, so rapid improvements and alterations could be made.
• SWJ (small wars journal):  Will Los Pepes emerge in Mexico?  Militia formation is inevitable.
• CFR's (council on foreign relations) Lydia Khalil writes a paper in favor of open source counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.  The Iraq Model.  LOL, I outlined this back in 2005 re: Iraq in my NYTimes OpEd and I didn't get an invite to the CFR.  ;-P
• Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop.  Looks like an interesting read.
• The dynamics of globalized feudal economics in Afghanistan.  Skip the political commentary and get to the good stuff.

John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus has a new article on the rise of urban takedowns. He points out, correctly, that these takedowns are more effective than ever on a tactical level: 

The urban attacks of the 1990s and the early 2000s, however, are qualitatively different. Destructive power has increased due to better operational sequencing of paramilitary attacks, car bombs, and suicide bombers. Multiple elements can operate in time, utilizing better C2 nodes than before. Hostage takers have developed better fortification, surveillance, and perimeter defense skills. 

In short: the breadth (number of sites/zones attacked), speed, and duration of urban assaults are increasing.  However, even with these upgrades, the improvement in the productivity of urban assaults is, at best, only slightly better than linear.  Why?  The costs and the training required to accomplish these attacks, once factored in, are still extensive (made even less effective by the loss of the attackers in the assault).  

In contrast, urban takedowns using systems disruption that use the global guerrillas model (like the Bandh), reduces training/costs to negligible levels while increasing the breadth of the shutdown.  In addition, very few of the attackers are ever caught in this type of attack, which allows repeated use of learned skills and easier recruitment.  Repetition of method and movement expansion are many multiples higher as a result.  In other words: an exponential improvement.

Globalization is in the process of eviscerating traditional loyalties.  In the 20th Century, loyalty to the nation-state (nationalism, often interwoven with ideology), was supreme.  In today's environment, a global marketplace is now the supreme power over the land.  It has drained the power of nation-states to control their finances, borders, people, etc.  Traditional ideologies and political solutions are in disarray as the fluctuating and often conflicting needs of the global marketplace override all other concerns.  As a result, nation-states are finding it increasingly impossible to govern and the political goods they can deliver are being depleted.   

Interestingly, nothing of any size that can attract loyalty has stepped into the breach, nor is it likely to.  Loyalty to a faceless and capricious (and sometimes vicious) global marketplace is impossible.  NOTE:  there is an animistic, in that it attaches meaning to natural phenomenon, cult in Anglo-Saxon countries devoted to 'free markets', which attracts some belief/faith but little true loyalty (in that few people would die for it).  With the replacement for the nation-state, that advances the interests of its members nowhere in sight, we have seen a growing shift in the primary loyalties of people to smaller groups that will -- to the corporation, family, gang, tribe, religious group, clan, virtual group, etc.

This shift in loyalty is proliferating, growing in strength since these groups can as easily access the global marketplace as easily as any nation-state.  With this access, they can deliver the benefits to their members that nation-states cannot or will not deliver.   

Some items of interest:

• Militia formation in Naxalite territory.  Cobra gangs (similar to Colombia's AUC).
• Afghan cash amnesty/training program for Talib's ramping up.  Wrong approach.  What does work (at great long term cost):  Exploit divisions and form/rent militias on local primary loyalties.  In short, an open source counter-insurgency.
• A senior IEA (the International Energy Agency) official turns whistleblower.  He 'claims it (the agency) has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.'
• Anatomy of an economic parasitic.  The Times talks with the gray men of Goldman Sachs.  Remember:  When the loyalty of the USSR's elites (the bureaucracy or nomenklatura) shifted to local interests that directly interacted with global markets (using the remains of the state as tradable commodities), the Soviet Union collapsed (it wasn't due to US defense spending, LOL). 
• Systempunkt in Brazil/Paraguay.   The Itaipu hydroelectric plant.  Flow restrictions on base load power plants = cascades of failure.
• Lind on Fort Hood shooting.  
• Xerox, silver ink, and DIY 'printed' circuit boards.
• Anyone have a copy of Taleb's newest paper: "Common Errors in the Interpretation of the Ideas of The Black Swan and Associated Papers" All I can find is a citation (restricted academic journals are a form of societal damage).  UPDATE:  Got it, thanks much.
• The UK is moving quickly to the China model of capitalism.  No legitimacy necessary.

Some items of interest:

• 60 Minutes on cyberwarfare.  Sensationalist.  Based on a comprehensive misunderstanding of the dynamics of warfare driving this.  The $17 billion that is slated to be spent on US "cyber security" will almost certainly be ineffectual.  The consultants in the show are so far behind the powercurve, they aren't even in the game.  They are only a small part of phalanx of contractors now pushing cyber security -- a process akin to the sale of the Maginot line....
• The intrepid reporter Michael Yon is twittering on warfare around world. 
• The first Thuraya war.  How the Thuraya satellite telephone is making desert warfare in the Sudan/Darfur, faster and more dynamic than ever before. "A commander with a handful of Landcruisers and a Thuraya is essentially autonomous at a tactical level. It is possible for commanders who formally belong to different factions to coordinate a joint operation at very short notice. Their superiors can do little about it. And it happens."
• Piercing the veil of anonymity.  Celebs now.  Wealth next.  The gray man defense has gone the way of the dodo.  
• Hacking workshops.  One approach to organic growth in hacking.  
• Another "Robbian" sighting.  LOL.
• O'Reilly.  Three offbeat paradoxes of the Internet Age.  Fragmentation rather than cooperation.  More choice = less choice (due to network dynamics).  More empowerment means a loss of control (the writer assumes empowerment is a myth, it's not, but the loss of control is true).

 "Bandh" is a Hindi word meaning "closed."  It's often used to describe labor or political strikes that shut down economic activity.  

The Naxalites -- India's huge, decentralized and nominally maoist insurgency -- have recast the term as a form of warfare riven with criminality.  When the Naxalites declare a Bandh, they shut down all connectivity from cell phone service to trains/roads to water to electricity. 

Bandh Dynamics

The Naxalite Bandh employs physical systems disruption (described at length in this blog and in Brave New War).  Systems disruption, as a means of warfare, can be applied to any locality that is reliant on modern infrastructure for social and economic activity.  The Bandh is simply the application of systems disruption to completely "take down" a locality for a set period of time (measured in days) in order to attain coercive control.   Characteristics of this approach include:

• Ease of application.  Attacks against a handful of key nodes can bring down large and complex networks.  Accomplishable by small groups with few training requirements for individual actors.
• High ROIs (returns on investment).  Very inexpensive and highly leveraged approach.  Attacks generate damage in the target up to one million times greater than the cost.  
• Low attrition.  Attackers rarely suffer casualties or arrest due to how difficult it is to protect infrastructure.  Further, through cascades of failure, attackers can assault targets at a distance.

How The Bandh Works

The Bandh approach works in achieving coercive control due to the impact of systems disruption on social and economic networks.  It breaks them down due to a combination of 1) shock therapy (think of this in terms of a reboot that allows malicious entities to take control of a system), 2) a disruption tax (repeated applications of systems disruption impose "a tax" that slows/drives out legacy economic activity), and 3) an isolation and delegitimization of legacy elites (business/government).   After repeated applications of a Bandh, the city/locality is ready to do whatever the Naxalites require.

A Growing Monopoly of Systemic Coercion

The Naxalite network spreads through a very simple and lightweight process:  

• The core groups maintains the skills to plan and execute systems disruption (a foco).  
• When a city is targeted, the foco works with a local gang to which it can extend the Naxalite "brand" and build a disruption plan for that city.
• The local group carries out the Bandh and gathers the benefits.  

Ongoing operations consist of maintaining the ability to enact a Bandh on a large number of cities with only occasional activation.  In any year, only 30% of the Bandhs need be activated to ensure compliance of the targets and provide a lesson to the others.  

Cui Bono?

The Naxalites don't replace the existing government, as per the 20th Century insurgencies the US COIN doctrine was built to fight.  Instead, it extracts the financial rewards akin to what a government would expect.  In short, it is pure global guerrilla.  For example:

• It exacts "taxes" on local businesses and individuals.
• It promotes and participates in a thriving black market (which is made even more important due to suppression of "legitimate activity").
• It can rent the Bandh to politicians and businessmen for their own purposes.  Competitive Bandhs from labor and politicians (aka non-violent strikes), are disrupted and can often turn violent when the Naxalites enforce their monopoly.  

NOTE: Thanks to Shlok Vaidya, who is an expert in all things Naxalite for help on this post.  

NOTE2:  If the Taliban applied the Bandh methodology to Pakistan (it wouldn't work in Afghanistan), replacing some of the monetary gain with social requirements (religious rules that the population must follow) to retain the movement's character, it would sweep the country in less than five years.  Instead, luckily, it insists on blood'n guts terrorism and the seizure of territory...

Some items of interest:

• India's Naxalites are taking out cell phone towers.  Naxalite Bandh's use system disruption to isolate areas of interest to break them economically.  Theoretically, this provides a coercive blanket over the impacted area encouraging compliance with local militias, and drives the area into a dependence on black market activity that they control ($$).  Cell phone disruption works extremely well in countries that skipped land line expansion (India, China, etc.).  
• Narco-evangelicals in Rio.  "The favela I control has the word of God everywhere."  Very powerful model since it pastes broad legitimacy onto gang activities.  It's also a ready made template for the fictive kinship and exceptionalism that's  necessary for manufacturing tribes.  This model is exportable to the US etc.
• Brazilians hacking legacy military satellites for private global comms.  Note the equipment:  "All the gear can be bought near any truck stop for less than $500. Ads on specialized websites offer to perform the conversion for less than $100."  Sounds like fun.
• The future of the top 1% everywhere. From Argentina:  "His security detail involves mostly an armored Humvee and two other armed vehicles full of armed guards... He moves around at all times with a convoy you’d only see in Iraq. He protects his family in a similar manner, and yet his 10 year old son suffered a kidnapping attempt."  Financial capitalism's end state?
• Zenpundit has redefined swine flu as a shift to kleptocracy.  Now that's a scary epidemic!  ;->  Increasingly, plans for rapid responses to disasters (man-made or natural) in the US are being focused on protecting elites in government and corporations to the exclusion of broad public safety.
• Detroit into farmland?  Not interesting.  A TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) filled by resilient communities would be more interesting.

Some items of interest:

• Narco-evangelicals. From the UK to Mexico.
• "The Mexicanization of US Law Enforcement."   Interesting, Killebrew from CNAS is using my terminology: "The drug lords... are seeking to “hollow out our institutions, just as they have in Mexico.”  NOTE:  Of course, this pales in comparison to a similar "hollowing out" perpetrated by the financial services industry on US legal/regulatory institutions.
• Another item, right out of "Power to the People":  Goldman Sachs gets a bigger H1N1 vaccine allotment than a hospital.  For those dependent on the global economy, your security will increasingly depend on who you work for.  
• Hyper local production.  Ghana's unlicensed gunsmiths have the ability to produce 200,000 weapons a year, some of which are at a quality equal to global manufacture (h/t Duncan Kinder).  I suspect that the quality and quantity of local manufacture will eventually greatly exceed global manufacture as events progress.
• Synthetic neurobiology.   MIT's Ed Boyden.
• Factor E-Farm releases its compressed earth brick machine.  9 bricks per minute.  Kits for sale.
• A map mash-up of global shipping traffic, down to the hour (h/t Coming Anarchy).
• This could have been retitled, "The Men that Stare at Military Theory" to the same effect.  ;-> 
• Unemployment tops 10.2% in official numbers (which are fluffy).  Graph relative to previous recessions (this is the worst on record since D1).  People forced into part-time work is still large and growing.  The big hole in these numbers (since they were built for the last century and not this one) is the massive number of self-employed consultants that aren't generating anything close to what they did 2 years ago.  
• Canary in the coal mine.  Lone gunmen in Orlando.

Some items of interest:

• The UN pulls 600 staff out of Afghanistan.  The recent Taliban attack on UN staff quarters worked.   It destabilized the organization by piercing the "organizational veil."
• WSJ.  Big Mexican pot farms on US Indian reservations.  A little on the economics:  "The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S. officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch about $120 million on the open market."
• Naked Capitalism on invoking God to defend greed.  This is as old as the hills.  Not only does it make greed righteous, it makes economic failure damnable.
• It costs $500,000 a year to send a soldier to Afghanistan.  Hilariously, even mercenaries are cheaper (that includes the relatively expensive people from the company formerly known as Blackwater).

In almost every resilience scenario I can imagine, there seems to be an intense need for people that can fix, repurpose, replicate, or build from scratch machines, systems, and tools.  Essentially, hackers.  They are needed in roles from maintenance of existing social activity to externally focused trade to local defense/offense.  The implication is that if you don't have people in your community, group, gang, or tribe that can do this, you only have two options:   either a bare bones existence (hardscrabble) or a predatory one.  The reverse is also true.  The better and more innovative your hackers are, the wealthier and safer your community will be. 

Here's a hierarchy of resilience hacking:

• Fixers.  People that can repair existing equipment to maintain its previous function.  (these people are the staple of almost all disaster fiction).
• Makers.  People that repurpose existing technology through the implementation of alterations to change its function.  A corollary to Makers are people that improve existing products/systems (make them more powerful/better/faster).  
• Creators.  People that create new tools or unique systems from scratch using raw materials (think fab lab hacks).  

I'm sure that others can come up with better terms or more refined descriptions.  Suggestions are always welcome.  

The brilliant writer, Bruce Sterling adds a category:  wranglers.  These are people that train "intelligent" machines to do new or unique things (under the assumption that computer intelligence, or connections via sensors/wireless to remote computer intelligence, will increasingly be added to everything that is built).

NOTE:  the higher you go in the hierarchy, the greater the need for global communications and collaboration via open source networks.  Also, in the communities that develop to support this activity, any and all existing copyrights, patents, DRM, etc. would be void out of necessity.  It would therefore, by default, operate in direct opposition to an increasingly stagnant global status quo.

NOTE2:  In global guerrilla warfare, all of the roles above constitute a small group's defense industry.  

Some items of interest:

• Boing Boing.  Corporate capture of government function.  Secret, a denial of transparency claiming (falsely) nation-security interests, copyright treaty details.  It's becoming impossible to argue that the US isn't a "Banana Republic."
• Guide to building an automated sentry gun.  Add software/intelligence to everything...
• Alex Steffen at World Changing critiques Transition Towns.  Rob Hopkins responds.   I like both men, they are exceptional thinkers.  The question they are debating is whether you believe global/national or local action ultimately prevails.   The debate might already be settled since Transition Towns presents a viable path towards to mitigating the impact of looming economic collapse and a hyper-concentration of wealth/influence (this gives it strength).  Secondly, as the copyright effort above demonstrates (yet again), global solutions are impossible since global governance is firmly in the thrall of parasitic financial interests.
• Drew Endy on biohacking -- late 2007 in a pitch to computer hackers -- on adding layers of abstraction for improvements in the rapidity of programming and reverse engineering biology.  Interestingly, insanely generous copyright/patent protection for the discovery of genetic parts, will actually accelerate hacking (as it has in other forms of intellectual property).
• Comic.  Adventures in synthetic biology.

Newly discovered mechanisms of parasitic behavior, particularly competition between parasites, have value as models for understanding social conflict in a fractured post-ideological age.  Parasitic competition within a specific host generally increases the fitness of the parasites involved in the competition.  In short, this competitive process leads to accelerated improvement, such as higher densities of infection and more virulent/deadly strains (which could make it seem more like coopetition than competition).

Here's three examples of parasitic competition.  All three methods use an indirect approach that leverages control of environmental variables to limit competitors: 

• Exploitation.  The ability of the parasite to control host behavior.  For example, the control of host hormones (sex, metabolism, etc.) to accelerate their own fitness at the expense of competition.  
• Apparent.  The ability of a parasite to attract a predator that is lethal to its competition (typically, an immunological response).
• Interference.   The release of toxins into the host to kill competitive species.  

All three mechanisms of competition can be seen in recent examples of social conflict.  

Here's a simple overview of what is increasingly becoming the dominant method of offensive warfare in the 21st Century.  Early applications of this methodology to modern conflict have been very successful.  In short, it's better to understand its dynamics than to assume it doesn't exist.

There are two basic types of systems disruption:

• Social.  Disruption of social networks.   Division of the network into non-cooperative or openly antagonistic centers of gravity. 
• Physical.  The disruption of physical networks, particularly infrastructure.

System disruption leverages network structure and dynamics to turn small attacks into large events.  Selection of the best point to attack is based on an analysis of the network's design and flows.  The term to describe this point is: the systempunkt.  Essentially, the systempunkt is the point in the network, that if attacked, will yield the maximal possible impact.  

Systems disrupters typically prioritize attacks based on the potential of the following:

• Cascades of failure.  
• Cross network/system cascades.
• Self-reinforcing failures.  Those failures that generate feedback loops that keep the system from returning to the status quo ante (the former equilibrium point).

• Highly connected nodes (particularly useful in scale free network designs).
• Sources of systemic flow.
• Cross sub-network or cluster connections.

Systems disruption is superior to traditional methods of attack due to the following:

• It is effective at delegitimizing governments.  Service availability is a key political good.  
• It produces minimal public backlash and is likely to generate co-operative entities.
• It is easy to recruit for (few skills and very little, if any combat required), usually results in low casualties and few arrests, and requires nearly zero (financing, equipment, and personnel) to accomplish.

Open source warfare, a set of autonomous groups engaged in coopetition to achieve an amorphous promise/goal, works extremely well with systems disruption due to the following:

• Rapid discovery of systempunkts across a variety of target systems/networks via tinkering networks and stigmergic processes of cross network communication.
• Increased chance of repetitive attacks due to a multiplicity of groups.
• Self-reinforcing dynamics.  Systems disruption gives rise to groups that can profit or exploit the dynamic.  These groups in turn disrupt systems to perpetuate their survival and thereby give rise to yet more groups.

Most target networks are designed to maximize efficiency.  This design constraint yields configurations that are particularly vulnerable to systemic disruption.  Further, globalization (due to network integration, tight coupling, and network complexity) have made systems disruption applicable to nearly every corner of the globe.

Urban environments are particularly vulnerable to systems disruption due to the extreme concentration and cross connections of the networks required to sustain high population densities.  As a result, urban takedowns are possible if not probable.

The high levels of amplification and potential reach of system disruption allows participants in a local conflict to attack regional and global foes with minimal effort.

Systems disruption can generate results (damage) that if measured in a return on investment (the damage caused divided by the cost of the attack) that exceed one million percent.

The long term trend toward individual superempowerment -- the leverage gained by individuals due to network access and new tools -- is made dangerous due to an ability to accomplish systems disruption.

Some items of interest:

• SOCOM.  "National Manhunting Agency"  While this proposal is tied to current affairs, it's not hard to see this becoming the future of SOCOM due to the exponential rise of individual superempowerment (as in, when one man can declare war on the world...).
• Bruce Sterling: "I wonder what’ll happen to our civilization when people realize that financiers don’t really do very much for the privilege of mishandling all the money. They work extremely hard, don’t get me wrong — they just don’t allocate funds very effectively. Societies top-heavy with financiers are in visible, physical decline — empty houses, unhealthy populations, decaying bridges, hollowed-out industries, that sort of thing."  NOTE:  30 years of gross mis-allocation of capital and counting...  If the growth in income/GDP had been allocated per the post-WW2 social contract, median incomes in the US would be $80-100k and not $40k and falling.  Further, the investments made by this financially empowered middle class would have been MUCH better.  However, this doesn't matter, we are where we are and it's getting worse.
• Panzer points to exponential debt loads.  These graphs radically understate the problem due to the chasm between average income and median due to wealth concentration.  Unsustainable trends are actually unsustainable.
• Lind.  La Familia. "This model – an illegal but widely profitable local economy + social services + religion – will, I think, spread widely."   It appears that Bill Lind is moving towards GG theory, however, he's wrong in thinking that global guerrillas replace the state.  Chet Richards appears to get this in his comments at the bottom of the article:  we may be witnessing 4GW as the evolution of crime more than it is the evolution of war.   Successful GGs are both additive (they bring new economic connections to the global economic substrate) and minimalist (in that they have few rules/requirements for those that live within their areas of operation).
• Cascio.  Carbon 350.  Again:  Isn't global warming an issue of concern only for globalization's shrinking number of winners?  
• Roubini.  Bubbling our way out of crisis.  In controls theory, this type of corrective is pure poison.  It implies that we will have a fierce financial "recovery" followed quickly by a collapse worse than the one we just experienced (this is in contrast to a corrective that is focused on improvements in the inherent stability of the system via sustained income growth/debt reduction in the middle class).
• FP (old).  Do government's control their cyber-war efforts?
• Bloomberg.  Hamas rockets that can reach Tel Aviv?  Once these inevitably become DIY (do-it-yourself) devices, the occupation is at the start of the end game  (since more accurate and more plentiful DIY tech will follow).  Substituting DIY rocket/RPV tech for suicide bombers is already a dominant strategy due to a large number of factors.

Some items of interest:

• Oath Keepers.  Potentially viral dynamite under the right conditions:  focused on police and military officers.  
• Newark.  Citizen patrols.
• Kunstler.   "How bad is the situation 'out there' really? In my view, things are veering toward such extreme desperation that the US government might fall under the sway, by extra-electoral means, of an ambitious military officer, or a group of such, sometime in the near future."  
• Paris bike program.  80% of bikes broken/stolen due to a grass roots campaign of systems disruption: as in, "global warming is something for the well off," everything is already broken.
• PBS:  light documentary on the broken middle class even in seemingly immune regions of the US.
• The US policy elite continues to be completely disconnected from any semblance of reality as this Ignatius column demonstrates.  
• We live in an age where wealth and influence is growing ever more concentrated and thereby increasingly unjust/unstable, while the ability to do everything, from making war to building things to mass communications, can now (or soon will) be accomplished by nearly anybody with the desire to do so.  From a historical perspective, I'm fairly sure that this is a recipe for a global disaster.  

Some items of interest:  

• Privatopia sighting in Detroit.   From Time magazine: "Cooper, 29, is a private-security detective, one of many who patrol once prosperous enclaves like Palmer Woods, Boston-Edison and Indian Village. With the city's police force cut more than 25%, private security appears to be one of Detroit's few growth industries. Local precincts are overwhelmed with shootings and other violent crime, leaving companies that supply home protection with long customer waiting lists. "People put a premium on security when unemployment and crime go up," says Larry Dusing, founder of Dusing Security & Surveillance, which has expanded into three neighborhoods.... Members of the Historic Indian Village Association, a local residents' group, share the cost of private security — about $30 per household each month. Association president Doug Way, 42, moved to Detroit with his wife seven years ago and fell in love with Indian Village's 19th century manors, built for the city's emerging industrial barons. Footing the bill for private security is almost like paying an extra tax, he acknowledges, but it's worth the cost."        NOTE: At some point, in the not too distant future, security becomes a national service that you pay a subscription for (like health insurance). It will be branded, available in select locations, and include high tech gadgets from panic buttons to video capture devices.  
• ROI (return on investment) for Nigeria's MEND.  Four years of attacks that disrupted one million barrels a day of production (on average) = ~ 1.4 billion barrels disrupted.  Direct costs at an average price of ~$70 a barrel and a $20 extraction cost to Nigerian kleptocrats and their corporate allies = $70 billion.  Impact of the loss of 1 m barrels a day on the world, assuming a ~$10 premium due to the loss and ~80m barrels a day of global output = $800 m a day or  $1.17 trillion.  Loss of global economic output due to the premium = ~.5% of $50 trillion global GDP = $0.75 trillion.  Total cost = ~$2 trillion.  Cost of attacks = ~$1 m.  ROI = 200 million %.
• Targeting the UN.  Slowing reconstruction and election monitoring.  
• Pakistan.  Attacks on government/military personnel continue while ignoring the fact that Pakistani infrastructure is past the breaking point (which makes it easier to disrupt).  If the "Taliban's" current level of effort at blood and guts terrorism were redirected against urban infrastructure -- all Pakistani cities would be inoperative, the national economy would be in free fall, and social fragmentation would be inevitable.  Unlike blood and guts terrorism, system disruption would minimize backlash/opposition (both at the national and global levels) and likely manufacture a plethora of open source allies rather than foes.

Over the last couple of years, lots of young people (from high school through recent college graduates) have asked me:

What should I be doing to prepare myself for an uncertain future?

Since I get this question a couple of times a week, I'd thought I'd publish it for posterity.  To the extent it's useful (it may be utter trash), here it is:

You will need train yourself to be an entrepreneur, to run your own business.  This requires an ability to do everything from designing your own products to selling products to keeping the books straight.  

That being said, you should still go to college (if you haven't already).  For the most part, it's not going to play much of a factor in how you make your living in the future (for most people).  Instead, do it because it improves you as a human being.  Learn about everything you can while you are there, from philosophy to physics.   However, don't spend much money doing it (state universities are more than good enough).

How do you prepare for making a living?   

Here's the maximal strategy for those that can pull it off (I'm assuming that if you are reading my work and you understand it, you certainly have the smarts to pull it off).  

Learn to make/repair things.  Learn computer aided design CAD/CAM.  Ride the wave in learning laser etching, 3D printing, and other fabrication techniques.  Learn how to use traditional tools and explore materials science and basic electronics/circuit design.  Hack existing products (copy what others have done to spool up on the process) to improve them or put them to unintended uses.  Add some biohacking to the mix if you are so inclined.

Learn how to communicate/collaborate with others online.  Better yet, learn how to use a scripting language and design/operate an interactive Web site.  Learn how to build a database and structure/share data (xml).  Get the hang of publishing online and building/growing an audience -- it's a great way not only to market product/yourself, but find collaborators on ventures.

With the skills above in hand you are now capable of converting a wide variety of ideas into thriving entrepreneurial ventures (from scratch and for a pittance).  

The final layer you need to succeed is to learn about running a business.  The most important thing you need to learn is how to sell.  Take any job that puts you close to a GREAT salesman.  Learn the process, from finding customers to closing contracts.  As a final layer, teach yourself some small business accounting (it provides discipline).

In short, this is what you need to become a one person company and be routinely successful.   

NOTE:  In reflection, this recipe is also a route to become a one man/woman army.

Some items of interest:

• Pentagon wargames Afghanistan.  This wasn't a real wargame (I wasn't invited ;-P) that tested alternative strategies.  It was actually a PR game aimed at influencing an internal audience. 
• TechShop.  A commercial version of a community workshop.  This type of shop is something we are going to see lots of in the "maker" future (decentralized manufacturing) as people pool tools to get things done.  The training available there looks like a post-graduate course list for the swelling ranks of college educated unemployables (at a microscopic fraction of the cost of going to a university).  
• Paranormal activity.  Movie made for $15k makes $62.5 m and still going strong (directed by a video game maker).
• The Homebrew Manufacturing Revolution.  An excellent paper by Kevin Carson.  Recommended!
• Leah Farrall, owner of the excellent blog "All Things Counter-Terrorism," has an asynchronous conversation with Abu Walid al Masri (Taliban media strategist).
• Superempowered actors in Movies.  See the trailer for "Law Abiding Citizen."  Looks GREAT!
• Washington's blog.  Branding the US system (in an era of postcapitalism and postdemocracy).  From fascism to socialism to kleptocracy to plutocracy.  The terms are flying fast and loose.
• I love DIYbio.