This episode of “Ask the Strategic Genius” is about logistics and the 2nd Amendment: two things you typically will not find connected in public discourse. Time to cure that!
“Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals study logistics” – Napoleon Bonaparte*
As we charge forward to the quadrennial “Changing Of The Oligarchy” ritual, one topic that remains off the talking points is: ‘defense’ spending. Some candidates favor spending vastly more, others slightly less, but none of them appear to be serious about adjusting the money-valve from the ‘full on, locked’ position.
For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who
Étienne de La Boétie
has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!
The media in the US are uncertain as to whether the US oligarchy is going to back Erdogan, or not. So their language is carefully pared-back, like their language regarding torture, or the imperial wars that the US has waged since 1990. They accept terms like “collateral damage”* and “enhanced interrogation” or “ethnic cleansing” instead of actionable terms like “area bombing” “torture” and “genocide” – the US is signatory to various treaties that criminalize “area bombing” so let’s just call it “unfortunate mis-identification” and the problem’s solved. [Read more…]
Because: we love peace and motherhood. Then Russia got the bomb – but that’s OK, the balance of power remains that way. Who’s Next?
The US is deploying another 560 troops to Iraq. They will be deployed wearing Birkenstocks so that there are “no boots on the ground.”
The topic is Stuxnet. That’s the “mysterious” virus that damaged computer systems at the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, and offlined several critical systems at the German-built 1970s nuclear reactor at Bushehr.
A couple years ago, I was invited to do the closing keynote at the ISSA world conference in LA. It was a pretty memorable evening for me because I took the stage after a panel consisting of Richard Clarke, some FBI executive, and another speaker – and they were talking about cyberwar and the need for more government oversight to protect us against cyberterror (in particular) and terrorism (in general). So, I started my talk off by saying “I know it’s inappropriate for a keynote speaker to start off by rattling off a critique of the panel ahead of them, but there was a lot of lying going on…” Things went downhill from there.