Following hot on the heals of Fukuyama’s piece, Robert Kaplan addresses the current state of America’s foreign policy and the Pentagon’s new Quadrennial Defense Review in the New York Times with Send in the State Department.

Kaplan focuses on and encourages the use of small units opertaing semi-autonomously in strife torn areas.

Take the Horn of Africa, a low-profile theater where small American military teams comb a large region and engage in military training and civil affairs projects with local forces as a way to build relationships in advance of a major crisis. Never again should we be in the situation that we were in on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where there were no intelligence assets on 9/11 because we had closed all our networks the decade before, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Kaplan goes on to urge the involvement of the State Department in these missions. This suggests that we need to not only equip military units to operate with force, but to be able to initiate if not state-building, then village-building projects that go beyond picking up garbage or short-term humanitarian relief. Perhaps units will be equipped with city planners or with political scientists who can begin to work with local residents to initiate new institutions. In his article The Mayor of Ar Rutbah in Foreign Policy last November, James Gavrilis suggests the need for such a change. An Army Special Forces officer, Gavrilis had first hand experience with insitution and city-building as his group moved through Iraq. As his unit passed through the town of Ar Rutbah, they stopped and attempted to help the local population implement civil institutions. He writes:

Because we didn’t receive any guidance for governance or reconstruction, and certainly not for spreading democracy, I had to make up everything as I went, based on the situation on the ground and what I remembered from my Special Forces training and a handful of political science classes. I entered the city with only our strategic objective for Iraq in mind: to establish a free, democratic, and peaceful Iraq without weapons of mass destruction. And that is what I tried to achieve in my own microcosm of the war.

In his book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda suggests that war has seen a constant evolution based on changes in tactics and technology. He sees military operations set up as machines that run, consuming resources. He tracks the evolution of organization within military efforts, from the swarming machines of barbarian raiders to the supply-side machines of Napolean’s army. Often these changes are predicated on a shifts in technology. For example, the accuracy of the conical bullet provides a technological tipping point for military organization, allowing military organization to shift from large lines of rifle volleys to smaller, more independent units.

The implementation of smaller units that operate not only militarily, but also diplomatically suggests a further evolution of the military machine. The military evolves from not only destructive to constructive work. In DeLanda’s book he raises the ire of actual robots powered by artificial intelligence conducting military operations. Obviously, we have already reached this state of affairs with smart bombs. But each unit as a machine of combat and construction is far more intriguing. In this situation you have the destructive force laying the ground work for re-construction. Focus on re-constrution would seem to be a good development. One of the glaring missteps in the Bush Admininstration’s plan for Iraq was simply wiping away instituions without replacing them. The quagmire in Iraq illustrates the clear need for quick and constant attention to immediate building of civil institutions. As the army and special forces are especially equipped to be deployed quickly and widely, they should carry construction as an implicit goal.

Each group of special forces would serve as a little repair cell, equipped with both military power, and repair power. The unit would take on the task of both military exercises and implementing governmental institutions. Rather than state building, they would be individual units of village-building. The super-structure of the army would connect these individual areas of repair back to the central nervous system of the state. In this way, the structure of the army would then provide the initial network of connecting civil institutions.

While I think the trend to more autonomous and complete units is good, it is not without problems. My biggest fear with this is we tend to build things in our own image. If the military is the organization laying down civil institutions, what sort of civil institutions do you get? In the development of the military machine does embodying both destructive and constructive force in one institution create a sort of perpetual state machine?

We couldn’t call ourselves “I am the economy” if we didn’t give a little shout out to our former Federal Reserve Chairman as he retires, passing on the torch to respected fiscal economist Ben Bernanke. Sandra Day O’Conner got her hosannah in the State of the Union, and we think Mr. Greenspan should have too.

Though I disagreed with some of Mr. Greenspan’s recent defenses of tax cuts, you cannot deny that he has done an absolutely commendable job of leading the Fed for most of his 18 years. He has been great at making tough and even unpopular decisions. And also at keeping his trap shut, something President Bush should have done at the beginning of his term. Instead he did his best to talk the economy into a recession in order to propel tax cuts.

Words, they’re powerful, people.

In the epigraph to his 1972 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Studs Terkel quotes William Faulkner, “You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day — all you can do for eight hours is work.” Clearly, this Mr. Faulkner never found the time to play an MMORPG. Of course if he had played World of Warcraft or Animal Crossing: Wild World, he might have stood firm. Not because someone can’t sink eight hours straight in WoW, but, because if they did, it would simply fall into the category of work.

Read the full review of Animal Crossing on PopMatters.com

(more…)

You know I think would feel better about going to gym and running like mad on those stupid elliptical machines if I felt like all my expended energy was going somewhere worthwile. It’s so odd to be in that room and look around at all of the these other mildly affluent people who have so much pent up energy they need to just burn it off at a gym. It’s like dozens of little turbines spinning with no collection mechanism.

Why don’t they hook all of the New York Sports Clubs up to the New York power grid so that energy doesn’t go to total waste? I doubt it would amount to much, but it would be something. Even if they just found a way to partially power those TVs mounted inches from your face with the expended energy of your effort.

Think of all the energy that goes into producing food, shipping it to New York, serving it, consuming it, all so we can power our bodies. And what do we do with the surplus? Grind it into unharnessed friction and heat on treadmill tracks.

Makes the gym seem even more like a waste of time. Or maybe I’ve just found a way to justify my laziness by the need to be productive.

With distributed collaboration projects so in vogue, I began wondering if there might be a way to create an investment pool that utilized distributed knowledge and input. From the examples in James Surowiecki’s book “Wisdom of Crowds” to the the phenonmenon that is the Wikipedia, we’ve seen that knowledge and action distributed across large groups can produce coordinated results, given the right binding framework.

I think you could construct a framework that would allow people to invest together, harnessing the insights of individuals. You would need a fairly sizable group of people to raise capital and insure that you were catching a wide variety of opinions. You could create a mutual fund that operates on principles of decision markets.
Possible structure:

• Rather than pick stocks, individuals would identify both specific companies and sectors where they see growth potential. They would do this two ways:
• Picking actual commodities and tagging the picks with sector keywords
• Identifying upcoming areas sectors of the market and creating keywords. These sectors must be different than the commodities you have picked.
• The commodities and sectors would be aggregated to see which stocks and which sectors people believe display the most growth potential.
• A cross-section of the commodities and sectors would be used to make investments, with weight given to companies that fall into sectors that were tagged most often.
• Return for individuals would be weighted to the people who highlighted high-performing investments.
• But input to decisions remains the same for all individuals.