Are suburban communities viable post crunch?  To many, the answer is a resounding NO!  under any and all circumstances.  They see them, ala James Kunstler, as a gross misallocation of societal resources, that will inevitably devolve into a vast blight upon the national landscape as high energy prices and economic collapse run their course.  Given this preordained failure, the question these people (see the comments here for a sense of the sentiment) ask is:  how do we repurpose all of these broken suburbs (or in a moralistic tone: how do we provide salvation to suburbia's damned soul)?  

So, given this starting point, it's little wonder that efforts to answer this question (like Reburbia) dive headfirst into the fantastical -- from the conversion of ex-homes into purification systems for city waste water to the use of homes as business offices for start-up companies.

I start with the view that a suburban town is a community and not just type of architecture.  People/families live their lives in these towns.  So, as a community, it's ability to survive/thrive is a function of its adaptability.   If the future is going to be as tough as we think it is, then the question of suburbia really becomes:  are suburban communities adaptable enough to thrive in the future (as in:  becoming resilient communities).   Given the advantages of the suburban landscape (land, surface area, security, etc.) has over rural/urban in many revival scenarios (post crunch), the only existential threat to these communities appears to be the from the global financial system -- aka a foreclosure tsunami that decimates communities faster than they can reconfigure/change.  I think that problem is solvable.

What do you think?

For small groups of guerrillas, the shift in method towards the disruption of critical infrastructure has been fairly spectacular.*  Not only have the physical results of this methodology been noteworthy, its also been able to generate social and economic rewards of a similar magnitude.  

For example, Nigeria's MEND (coordinated by innovator, and global guerrillas reader, Henry Okah) was able to disrupt the production of one million barrels a day of oil for years with relatively few attacks/people, and little money.  Given that this production was light sweet crude and the tightness of the global oil markets (little slack), it's very likely that this disruption played a huge part in the rise of oil to $150 a barrel, which in turn forced the collapse of our fragile (akin to a termite, aka parasite, ridden structure) financial system in 2008.  This success has forced the Nigerian government to capitulate and negotiate with the group.  Another example has been the rise of India's Naxalites, who through physical systems disruption (a process of innovative disconnection called Bandhs) has been able to exert economic and social control over nearly a quarter of India. 

However, once you get over the mental leap required to adopt physical systems disruption, it's fairly straight forward.  From selection of targets (systempunkts) to the methodology of attack, the process is relatively scientific/tangible (although the results can be goosed with creativity/art).  This isn't the case with the disruption of social systems/networks.  The process required to successfully disrupt social networks is very murky -- so much so that attempting it is often akin to playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.  

Classically, attempts at social system disruption are what we typically term terrorism.  Terrorist methodology typically falls into following two categories (you can split the hair to get more, but why?):

• Symbolic.  Attacks on people or places that hold high social or political value to create shock and over reaction.  For example, the assassination of Pakistan's Bhutto or the attack on Iraq's golden mosque.  Note that both failed to yield the desired result.
• Blood and guts.  Attacks on the general population.  Maximal body count to create maximal shock.  Many, many examples.  Fortunately, although it hasn't caused attacks to cease, this method of attack suffers accelerating diminishing returns due to desensitization.  

Due to gross imprecision, fortunately, both techniques have historically been very, very weak in terms of measurable returns on effort and improvements in that attacking groups freedom of action/movement.  In short, they are more likely to fail than succeed in achieving the disruption desired (usually via overreaction).  The question is (for those interested in military and warfare theory): has, or will, an alternative methods emerge?  I think so, and if so they will crowd out ineffective competitors and inevitably become the dominant strategies for small groups.  What do you think?

UPDATE:  I shortened the post, the rest wasn't ready for prime time.

Some random items of interest:

• "Border Zones and Insecurity in the Americas" by Adam Elkus and John P. Sullivan.  
• Suarez International, the combat training company that's always at the bleeding edge of practicable tactical innovation, has a very interesting course coming up: "guerrilla sniper."
• Wired.  Software + webcam = 3d scanner.
• Some great posts on how to generate innovative synthetic thinking in technology/science at Eric Drexler's Metamodern blog.  My finding:  Great analysts are a dime a dozen, great synthetic thinkers are rare.  
• Comrade Simba.  I like how he writes.  This post reads like near term fiction.
• 17.5% unemployment in the US.  This is near depression 1.0 levels -- some argue that it already much worse if you track them according the stage of the event).  
• A law-enforcement reader submitted an short but excellent "five rings" map for analyzing the systemic structure of domestic violence cases (Download DV Systems Map).  This approach is useful in analyzing avenues of attack for social disruption targeting corporations/organizations.  
• The excellent blog, The Coming Anarchy (despite the name, it's very establishment), has a good post on how the Theban general Epaminondas neutralized Sparta through the creation of competitive cities rather than outright conquest (in the modern context, resilient communities and TAZs do the same to nation-states).  It also takes the strategist B.H. Liddell Hart to task (a little harshly I think).
• Sterling.  Growing small plot medical marijuana for income? Interestingly, this might be how home gardens get going again, pot income subsidizes the costs of setting it up and forces the development of the required skills....  Also, an ode to the UK surveillance state.
• Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.  Killology.

One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight...   Read the full article. 

NOTE: Bill Lind has asked me to host his columns and his collaborative work on fourth generation warfare (4GW) theory. I've set up a blog dedicated to this called LIND. I will be fleshing it out over the next couple of days.   IF this model proves successful, and I get the OK from the copyright owners, I'll add a site for John Boyd, Martin Van Creveld, and others.

UPDATE:  I think the new LIND site has most of the basics including the seminal 1989 article, "The Changing Face of War:  Into the 4th Generation" and the new 4GW manuals.  Still need a compilation of #242-322 for the On War series, more pictures, and an approved biography.

UPDATE 2:   I've also created a new site for John Boyd related material.  Right now, it's more archive than a blog due to the lack of a stream of new content.  If anyone has content I've missed (and that's likely plenty), please send me a note and I'll include it.  Also, if there are any ideas on what can be used to generate new ongoing content, please let me know.

Random items of interest:

• Washtimes:  Corruption costs Russia 18% of its GDP.  Is crony capitalism and hollow states the strange attractor for the nation-state?
• Reddit:  Q and A with a guy maintaining a middle class facade on $2,000 a year.   His approach:  downsize, get into the black (as opposed to debt), and add self-generated services (like solar power and lawn farming) when able to support yourself at low cost.
• Speculative post:  How relocalization happened. "That relocalization needs to happen, and will happen, is clear. Among other things, it’s clear from history; when complex societies overshoot their resource bases and decline, one of the things that consistently happens is that centralized economic arrangements fall apart, long distance trade declines sharply, and the vast majority of what we now call consumer goods get made at home, or very close to home."
• West Point CTC:  Analysis of the ISI (al Qaeda in Iraq).  A focus on networks and membership.  Sounds familiar:  The Sinjar Records reinforce anecdotal accounts suggesting that al‐ Qa’ida’s Iraqi affiliates rely on smugglers and criminals—rather than their own personnel — to funnel recruits into Iraq.  Good theory predicts.  Bad theory is doctrine.
• SNL anti-government comedy clip.  Somebody needs to tell China that the debt is a sunk cost from their mercantilist expansion.  They won't/shouldn't get it back.
• Building local militias.  Lots of stories today on the US plan to use open source counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.  However, the plan looks very shaky in it's application and doesn't consider what made Iraq uniquely suited to the strategy.  They (the US military) might want to rethink the implementation of it before wasting another year or so (in lives/treasure).  NOTE:  This is the strategy that I outlined re: Iraq in 2005 and re: Afghanistan in 2009 during my Armed Services Committee testimony (to a bevy of surprised Congressmen).    
• Societe General (the bank) advises its clients on how to prepare for economic collapse.
• US infowar conference site is hacked by "Turkish Hackerz"  View this photo.
• More later.

Short Answer:  divide it.

It's long been my contention that Iraq was stabilized at an acceptable level of controlled chaos due to a happy accident by al Qaeda (in an attempt to expand/lead the loose insurgency in a new direction).  What did they do?   They blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006.  This act of symbolic terrorism did indeed disrupt social networks as anticipated, however the consequences were ultimately disastrous for the Iraqi open source insurgency.  

The reason for this is it broke the dynamics of the open source insurgency in ways the US and Iraqi government's COIN efforts could not.  First, it created a permanent split between Sunni and Shiite insurgent groups/militias.  Coopetition ended.  Second, it motivated large Shiite militias to start an ethnic cleansing of Sunni areas.  This put acute pressure on Sunni guerrilla groups who were too small (by design to avoid US counter-pressure) to defend themselves against large militias operating in the open.  The result was an opening, very close to the one I described in my 2005 NYTimes OpEd, that allowed the US to convert Sunni guerrilla groups into militias that were not loyal to the central government (in direct contradiction to its COIN manual).   

It's a nice example of the dynamics of many to many conflict, social network disruption, and the development open source counterinsurgency.

See this excellent description at the blog, "Musings on Iraq" for more detail on the ethnic cleansing operations.  It also includes this money quote: "the majority of the Sunni insurgency gave up and switched sides to align with the Americans rather than face annihilation at the hands of the Shiite militias, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or the United States."

NOTE:  it's pretty clear from the above that social network disruption (either through attacks on symbolic targets or blood and guts terrorism) is like playing horseshoes with live hand grenades.  It's ultimately a losing strategy for advancing an open source insurgency.  Social network disruption is very likely to break standing order 6:  don't fork the insurgency.

Some random items of interest:

• Vigilante militias in Rio are displacing the drug gangs -- favelas under the control of militias has grown from 108 in 2005 to 400 in 2008 (out of 965).  Why?  They have a better (albeit parasitic) conflict/business model than the drug gangs since they act as a substitute for missing public goods/services normally supplied by the government.  First, they provide a minimal level of security and conflict adjudication.  Second, they make more money than the drug gangs by "taxing" everything from propane to cable TV to the gray market.  
• US gray economy estimated at $1 Trillion (not including criminal, outside of the evasion of taxes and regulation, activities) and growing faster than the "legal" economy.  
• Proposal and wiki for an open source fabrication lab.
• Somali pirates are expanding operations into the Indian ocean.  The combination of positive feedback loops (maritime insurance + rapid payoffs by crisis negotiators) and legal ambiguity (the biggest fear of a western navy and governments is that they might arrest a pirate -- prompting a massive/expensive legal tussle with few certain penalties and the forced extension of a visa to the former pirate once he is released from his short incarceration).  Is a franchise model for other locales possible?

• A business group in Ciudad Juarez asks for UN peacekeepers.  Hilarious. "Ciudad Juarez, population 1.5 million, has an average of seven homicides a day, with the total at 1,986 for this year through mid-October."
• Seccession.net.  County based secession effort.  

Random items of interest:

• Chris Blattman on Diego Gambetta's book, "The Sicilian Mafia:  The Business of Private Protection."  "The book tells a fascinating tale of the mafia, traced mostly from court transcripts, investigator files, and some interviews. He essentially advances an economic theory of the mafia: they are entrepreneurs and firms who collude and compete; the good they sell is not violence, or stolen property, but protection. That is, they enforce contracts in places the government can’t or won’t, like illegal and illicit markets, or areas where the police and courts are weak. They actively compete with the police to provide protection, and this good is in high demand. Every transaction done under the table cannot seek protection from the courts, and the mafia step naturally into this gap. Their name is their trademark, and they prevent new entry by force but also by complex social rules and ethnic identity."
• Thoughtgadgets points out that the Wikipedia page on the FT Hood incident is a good example of "crowdsourcing."  That last term is the type of buzzword that is bound to get the intellectually inflexible fuming.  ;-P
• Here are some examples of open source software for insurgency.  The "Transborder Immigrant Tool" that works on a cell phone from the group, "Electronic Civil Disobedience."  Some reviews of the tool (1) and (2).
• Video of unrest at UCLA due to a slated 32% increase in tuition.  In short, the final round (the first being privatization of the cost) of closing off access to the US middle class is starting to accelerate.  
• Chet Richards is shutting DNI.  That sucks.  I'm working on a way to save the archive of Boyd's and Lind's work on this site.

Almost all conflict theory assumes that there are only two primary antagonists.  State vs. State.  Mind vs. Mind.  Good vs. Evil.  Just vs. Exploitative.  Us vs. Them.  The list goes on and on.  What if conflict in a flat world isn't a two sided affair?  What if it consists of n sides? What if it involves many participants, each with a very different motive for conflict and each packaged in a variety of shapes/sizes/etc.?  How does that change conflict theory, strategy, tactics, organization, etc.?

Some random items of interest:

• The Coming Anarchy.  A warm embrace for violent corruption in the US.
• Climate change can happen very quickly.  I especially like the description of this type of change:  a climatic shift akin to physically repositioning the UK to the arctic in a matter of months.
• Used Xbox 360s for $40.  This price indicates Microsoft won the early battles with makers/hackers that want to reuse the Xbox.  
• Juan Cole on the Pakistani military in Waziristan.  Essentially, if guerrillas follow a a 20th Century strategy that emphasizes hard control over territory in combination with blood and guts terrorism that is focused on symbolic military/government/civilian targets, they are in for a world of hurt.  Contrast this to MEND, the Naxalites, and Mexico's criminal ecosystem.  However, the current situation might not last:  weakness often breeds innovation.
• Pew on US state government revenue shortfalls.  In short:  HUGE shortfalls as far as the eye can see.  This is going to have an interesting disruptive effect.  Here's an early example from California:   "California's finances have been so bad that the governor's finance director, Mike Genest, told a budget forum in Washington last week that back in February he had combed through the U.S. Constitution to research whether California could legally declare bankruptcy -- or revert to some kind of territorial status."  It's hilarious how close this is adhering to my very short 2007 paper on Privatopia.
• The mountain boyz scrapbook.
• Roubini:  a tale of two American economies.  As a sharp reader suggests: The inability to recognize this chasm exists, let alone bridge it, is a recipe for the spread of global guerrillas in the US.

Many people that want to organize groups online, typically attempt to do this through a site dedicated to a specific topic, an inflammatory article/video, etc.  This is a fairly arduous and suboptimal process.  A better approach is to build a site that enables people to accomplish things.  Software or sites that do this typically include:

• A database of some sort.  A collection of structured or unstructured data that can be used to do things.  This spans classic databases, file servers, wikis...
• A user interface that allows community participation.  Typically this allows the community to add to the database, monitor/vote on additions, reputation, etc.
• An open connection to the database (an open API) that allows new applications to be created.  From mash-ups to iphone apps.

The benefit of this passive approach is that it creates the potential to form an open source community around the topic.  As such, it not only attracts people tightly aligned with the creator's goals, but also a much larger group of individuals and groups that are pursuing tangential and marginally aligned interests.  Also, because the site is a tool, it benefits from a virtuous feedback loop that tends to accelerate growth:  people that use the site often see immediate benefit from the interaction.

Software tools of this type can be used to create open source communities for both positive endeavors (like building resilient communities) to insurgency.  

For example, say I wanted to run an insurgency against financial capitalism, and in particular an effort that specifically targets Goldman Sachs.  The software tool approach offers a variety of entry points for this endeavor.  One aggressive methodology that enables corporate targeting would involve:

• Assembling a public database of Goldman Sachs employees and alums.  This database could either be unstructured data in a wiki, or more forcefully, a structured database that includes name, work title, e-mail, home address, phone number, etc.  The key, in either approach is to seed the database with a critical mass of data to make it useful from the moment you launch it.
• Creating a method by which additions, creations, and improvements can be made to the database via the community.  Allow users to add info, from pictures of the individuals (cell phone stalking) to salary data and job roles... 
• Opening access to the data to allow an ecosystem to develop.  Community developers could use the data to create a mash-up tool that allows users to see all of the homes for Goldman Sachs employees on a Google map (or equivalent).  Another application could place employees into a model of the corporate hierarchy.  

In sum:  superempowerment can breed its own group dynamic.

Some utterly random items of interest:

• “There’s no point in talking to people who don’t have blood on their hands" and bribe potential Taliban recruits with bags of gold.  Updated UK COIN manual.  
• US:  Wall Street ethos hits main street.  Middle class shoplifting zooming.  "many people feeling the entire system is broken, that politicians are too corrupt or inept to fix it, and that there's nothing wrong with stealing from these big companies."
• Bailout wars.  iPhone game.
• Somali mobile phone business booming.  Connections rather than rules.
• Surviving in Argentina.  Riot survival kit.
• Nice codex that could serve as the basis for a discussion group/e-mail craziness rating.
• Decentralized/Resilient tracking.  BitTorrent doesn't need a tracker server anymore.  Pirate bay shuts their centralized system down.
• BBC.  Mexican journalist Julian Cardona on Juarez Mexico:  "We have an unsustainable economy - a globalised economy - which pays very low wages. That allowed an alternative economy to be created which also globalised - drugs. Both economies are playing here. Juarez is a very important place for both."  Good video attached to this article.  
• The minimal rule sets and insurgency.  Bing West, Afghan trip report at the SWJ:  "The theory of counterinsurgency is that villagers, once given security and services, will inform on the insurgents. In reality, the Pashtun Taliban aren’t oppressing the villagers, and the coalition doesn’t have the troops to provide security in many areas. So villagers hedge their bets."  Another example of theory in play.
• Washington Post.  Naval Postgraduate School applies military counter-insurgency methods to a crime ridden American city (early signs of a trend in the US twoards a Juarez scenario).

Synopsis: Here is a theoretical model for social network disruption (a compliment physical systems disruption -- as in the disruption of critical infrastructure).

_______________________

Why are organizations formed?  What keeps them together as a cohesive whole and what drives them to breakdown/fragment?  All of these questions are important from the perspective of warfare, particularly as warfare moves from a state controlled enterprise to one that includes a long tail of participants (from corporations to gangs/militias/etc.).

John Boyd's (arguably, America's greatest strategist) approach to these questions assumes that organizations form and operate to increase freedom of action -- they allow the accomplishment of actions that aren't possible through the actions of individuals.  Organizational breakdown in Boyd's models, occur when the disruption of moral, physical, and psychological connectivity within the organization creates non-cooperative centers of gravity (each aimed at achieving incompatible goals and unable to work together due to distrust, menace, etc.).  

An alternative approach is to use the transaction cost model of Ronald Coase.  In his model, organizations form to lower the costs of the transactions required to accomplish a task or objective.  Organizations lower these transaction costs by reducing the informational overhead required for a transaction -- by replacing an informationally expensive spot pricing mechanism with long term contracts that front load information discovery.  The natural tension between the benefits of each model (spot pricing) and long term contracts dictates whether an organization should be formed or dissolved.

This alternative explanation for organizational formation and cohesion suggests new forms of disruption.  Specifically, disruption aimed at increasing the information costs of transactions within and around the target organization may yield dissolution and breakup. A model for how to accomplish this includes:

• Existing measures and projections of external performance must become uncertain or risky.
• Internal transactions must be called into question by reducing confidence in long term contracts that bind the organization together -- distrust of internal reporting, employees, etc.
• The process of information discovery, for both internal and external transactions, must be slowed and or made prohibitively expensive to accomplish.

NOTE:  A transactions model might be more applicable to the many vs. many conflicts of the 21st Century than the approach advocated by Boyd, since the disruption to achieve success is lighter/easier to accomplish.  It also provides an upgrade to crude symbolic targeting for social network disruption.

Some items of interest:

• The post 'is the DoD locked in an Ivory Tower' was designed to ruffle some feathers.  Good.  However, for those that think I'm holding this site up as a better alternative, they are wrong.  I really don't care if the DoD uses my work on warfare or not.  I write this for myself and anyone else that finds it useful (apparently some do).  Warfare theory is now an open source effort.  Sorry.  ;-P
• As anticipated, a concern over costs (due to a loss of control over finances) is driving strategy on Afghanistan.  The administration is analyzing plans based on a $1 m per troop per year cost model.   
• A neat video on the decline of empires.
• The always insightful Charles Cameron provides some deep analysis of the mind of the FT Hood gunman.
• Using sanctioned criminality for proxy warfare.  Pirates (i.e. The Liverpool Packet).  A critique of defense as a public good.  Nice detail on ownership and compensation strategies for criminal warfare.  Rates of return of 200% were achieved.
• Warren Ellis on his experience with authoring Print on Demand (POD) books.  Given how easy it looks, it might be the way for me to start publishing again.
• Some ideas and terms to watch re: the future of the global economy.  All are currently in play:  The Chinese mercantilist system and the dollar peg.  Total US debt still climbing.  Gambling/kleptocracy and cognitive capture are back with a gov't guarantee.  A monster 'bubble" from the dollar carry trade.  The US federal and state governments and rivers of red ink.  US middle class in decline (rather than stasis).  Peak oil looks solid.

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.