WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2008
Immigration+Diversity+Assimulation=Innovation
Several of my posts have been about the future. Studying history, is useful in gaining a threshold from which to offer ideas for the future. Much of the world has spent the last milinium working out the rule-sets that have led to the lowest levels of poverty and violence in the history of the world. This level is still not acceptable to reasonable and caring people. But, I sense a new awareness is springing forth from this nation. The past decades have seen the largest precentage of foreign born citizens in the United States in one hundred years. What does this mean for the United States?

Tom Barnett has a post today, pointing out that immigration has gone global,Heightened immigration is a global phenomenon. He goes on to ask.

Key question posed for demographically moribund Old Core states: do you encourage integration or just circulation? Make them citizens or keep them guest workers? We seem to focus on citizenry, the Middle East on guest workers, and Europe seems somewhere in between on the subject, yes?

Picking up on this question, the United States has always opted for assimulating immigrants and making them citizens.One hundred years ago, strict immigration quotas were imposed and the flow was cut to a trickle in order to process and assimulate the millions of new citizens. Historians will argue that it was either pure nativism, or common sense to stem the tide. Those new citizens went on to help build the American Century. Now as the grandchildren of those immigrants and those who proceeded them by centuries begin to retire and die, the need for an infusion of legal immigrants becomes all to apparent.

I recently read John Kao's book Innovation Nation, (Kao’s site is here) he addresses the need for the United States to regain it's role as the most innovative nation on earth. Another book crossed my path this week that fueled some thought about how this all comes together.

Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect has it availible for download on his web site for free, http://www.themedicieffect.com/. I took advantage of this fine offer and found the book dovetails nicely into ideas that John Kao writes about. It also speaks to some of the same issues addressed in the post by Tom Barnett.

Immigration leads to diversity by causing intersections of ideas to cross when different cultures meet on a middle ground. Johansson writes that stepping into those intersections is where the fusion of ideas occur. He writes of four things that will break down one's associative barriers, and by following at least one of them, will lead into an intersection of innovation.

➣ Exposed themselves to a range of cultures
➣ Learned differently
➣ Reversed their assumptions
➣ Took on multiple perspectives

The above is a snapshot of what has been occuring in the United States and much of the world for the past century. When a country avoids that intersection, out of fear or tribal prejudices, it will being to fade and loose ground to places where the above conditions are fertile. Today, there are over 38 million foreign born legal residences or citizens in the United States. Their children are growing up to be Americans with all the values we hold dear.

Anyone who has read my blog in any detail, will understand that I am of the much maligned "Boomer" generation and grew up with most of the notions that are characteristic of that cohort group. For much of my life I was the average over-consuming self indulgent boomer. Then I stepped into an intersection, when I met my wife, and came to know and love her family and the people of China. Later I really jumped into the intersection when I returned to school and conected with a new cohort group, made up of the children of people born in countries that I had only dreamed about. My interest expanded, from thinking just about U.S. history to include the history of the World. The ideas that fuel my thoughts now come at me like wheel-spokes, converging in an intersection of ideas. I am now enriched with new concepts, and I will spend the rest of my days exploring and sharing them with all who will listen.

This intersection of ideas transends to the political arena. I think a lot of the appeal that Barak Obama has for young people of all stripes, is that he is a product of the intersection of cultures, which allowed him to learn differently, and gain multiply prespectives. I do not agree with most of his positions, but the fact that we all take him seriously, and show him respect, is a testament to the strength of our system to grow by assimulation, which will lead to innovations.

Today's blog is somewhat comtemplative for me. I am humbled with the pride of knowing so many who are poised to make a difference in the future. These people know who they are, I have written about several of them here, and others who have read this blog and sent me personal comments are no less well thought of, readers of this site will come to know of your talents in future posts.

Sunday, February 17, 2008
The Sin That Will Sink the Strategy
Yesterday Thomas Barnett reviewed his thinking regarding Network Centric Warfare. In January of 1999, Dr. Barnett published an article in Proceedings called "The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare", one of the first major articles with a devil's advocate take on Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski and John Garstka Network-Centric Warfare theory. His opinion was expressed in regards to his own writings on the deadly sin of Sloth within that context.

But here's the point I'd make on Cebrowski: this article started my SysAdmin conversation with him. Two years later, after 9/11, it finally blossomed into his support for the idea within the Office of Force Transformation. He never saw that shift as a retreat from his sense of what NCW could do in war. He simply recognized that it needed to expand its thinking to include what NCW could provide in the postwar.

Barnett highlights an important missing element, a peacemaker theory of warfare developed for the peacemaker roles as desired in objective by the Navy's new strategy. As we evaluate the prevailing strategic peacemaker theories of naval warfare today and the tactical ideas being applied to meet the peacemaker challenges, we believe this peacemaker theory of war can be clearly identified. We observe the two primary prevailing theories of naval warfare today includes Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) for the warfighter, but also Social Network-Centric Warfare (SNCW) for the peacemaker, and the strategic objectives desired are outlined within the context of the Cooperative Maritime Strategy for the 21st Century.

Julian Corbett believed the object of naval warfare "must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it." In that spirit we observe Social Network-Centric Warfare to be the cooperative processes that mitigates the disruption of cooperative command of the sea to promote peacetime commerce. As part of a circular theory. Social Network-Centric Warfare responsibilities for the Navy exist both prior to warfare (cooperative partnerships) and after warfare (reconstitution of commerce and security), also described as the periods of time absent warfare. We observe that Social Network-Centric Warfare relies upon the application of Network-Centric Warfare to regain command of the sea when command is lost.

In a retrospective review of the seven deadly sins put forth by Thomas Barnett, we see them not as the devil's advocate position he initially portrayed them as, rather as an antipodal point in the circular theory of warfare that the Navy is being asked to execute in strategy. We acknowledge up front that warfighting and peacemaking are not diametrically opposite, however we also observe the methods and/or intentions often are.

For example, the tactical application of Maritime Security Operations and Maritime Domain Awareness require quite different metrics. Maritime Security Operations is a very manpower intensive operation, requiring the dispersal and sustainment of sailors within a regional theater. It is desired this process will be enabled by Maritime Domain Awareness, a regional information process driven by technology for detection and classification of vessels in a regional theater. These two mutually exclusive but mutual supporting tactics require a combination of manpower and unmanned systems for information collection. We observe Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is a Network-Centric Warfare tactic for information dominance of a regional theater, while Maritime Security Operations (MSO) is a Social Network-Centric Warfare tactic for human engagement of security within that theater.

As outlined in the maritime strategy, the tactical ideas of our time for naval Social Network-Centric Warfare includes military operations other than war, cooperative relationships built on security and stability, cultural awareness, and Maritime Security Operations (MSO)..

As we go down the list, we find that the application of these tactics can be applied to address the concerns Thomas Barnett highlighted with NCW for six of the deadly sins. In our opinion, the deadly sin of Avarice remains unckecked, and remains the primary challenge that prevents the Navy from making progress in the application of its maritime strategy

Does Obama Want a Trillion-Dollar Global Tax?

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Does Obama Want a Trillion-Dollar Global Tax?
February 20, 2008 10:39 AM ET | James Pethokoukis | Permanent Link

I know we still have nine months to go before Election Day, but I may already have a winner for my "Understatement of the Election Season" Award. Right at the end of his big economic speech last week in Wisconsin, Democratic front-runner Barack Obama, last night's big primary winner in that state, said the following:

In the end, this economic agenda won't just require new money. It will require a new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people. We will have to learn more, and study more, and work harder. We'll be called upon to take part in shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.

Let's stick with that "new money" part for a moment. For starters, that "new" money is, of course, "your" money, your tax dollars. And it's a lot of money. Obama has proposed a couple of hundred billion buckaroos in new government spending along with new tax increases. But Obama may have just been getting started. Back in December, Obama sponsored the "Global Poverty Act," a bill that proposed the following (Efharisto to the American Thinker for spotting this one):

To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the [U.N.] Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.

What this bill would do, in short, is commit the United States to the U.N. declared goal that industrialized countries should spend 0.7 percent a year of their gross domestic product on foreign aid. Over the next decade or so, that would work out to around $850 billion. When the bill passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, Obama said that "as we strive to rebuild America's standing in the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and commitment to those in the developing world. Our commitment to the global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere."

How to pay for our penance? Economist Jeffrey Sachs, an advocate of this idea, has a suggestion:

We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes. A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity's climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.

So not only does Obama want to raise taxes on Americans making over $250,000 a year and eliminate the $102,000 wage cap on Social Security taxes, he perhaps wants to tack on another trillion dollars in taxes to pay for dramatically increased foreign aid. Of course, we could just borrow the money. Obama, after all, has not stressed balancing the budget during this campaign, instead promising to eventually put the budget on a "pathway" to being balanced.

And would such a commitment of money work anyway? Here is what Sachs critic William Easterly, an economic professor at New York University, wrote in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2003 on the topic:

Aid agencies have misspent much effort looking for the Next Big Idea that would enable aid to buy growth. Poor nations include an incredible variety of institutions, cultures and histories: millennia-old civilizations in gigantic China and India; African nations convulsed by centuries of the slave trade, colonialism, arbitrary borders, tropical diseases and local despots; Latin American nations with two centuries of independence and five centuries of extreme inequality; Islamic civilizations with a long history of technical advance relative to the West and then a falling behind; and recently created nations like tiny East Timor. The idea of aggregating all this diversity into a "developing world" that will "take off" with foreign aid is a heroic simplification.... The macroeconomic evidence does not support these claims.... The goal of having the high-income people make some kind of transfer to very poor people remains a worthy one, despite the disappointments of the past. But the appropriate goal of foreign aid is neither to move as much money as politically possible, nor to foster societywide transformation from poverty to wealth. The goal is simply to benefit some poor people some of the time.

Another option proposed by geopolitical strategist Thomas Barnett, who advocates that the United States partner with China and India to create a heavily armed global peace corps (our expertise and firepower, their manpower) to bring security to failed states in Africa and elsewhere across the globe. With a relatively safe environment established, private direct investment could then pour into those countries.

Probe sought in Marine vehicle delays
By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press Writer
47 minutes ago
The Marine Corps has asked the Pentagon's inspector general to examine allegations that a nearly two-year delay in the fielding of blast-resistant vehicles led to hundreds of combat casualties in Iraq.

The system for rapidly shipping needed gear to troops on the front lines has been examined by auditors before and continues to improve, Col. David Lapan, a Marine Corps spokesman, said Monday night. Due to the seriousness of the allegations, however, "the Marine Corps has taken the additional step" of requesting the IG investigation, Lapan said in an e-mailed statement.

In a Jan. 22 internal report, Franz Gayl, a civilian Marine Corps official, accused the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks.

Gayl's study, which reflected his own views, said cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down a February 2005 "urgent" request from battlefield commanders for the so-called MRAPs.

Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which weigh up to 40 tons and can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded, charged Gayl, who prepared the study for the Marine Corps' plans, policies and operations department.

Gayl, a retired Marine officer, is the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who heads the department.

The Associated Press first reported on Gayl's study Feb. 15. At that time, Gayl's work had not been reviewed by his immediate supervisor, Col. David Wilkinson, Lapan said Monday.

"The paper represents Gayl's personal opinions and is clearly marked as such," Lapan said. "It is both preliminary and pre-decisional, and therefore a mischaracterization to term his work an official study or report."

Gen. Robert Magnus, the Marine Corps' assistant commandant, disputed Gayl's conclusions in a recent interview with Marine Corps Times.

Magnus and other Marine Corps officials have said the defense industry lacked the capacity to build MRAPs in large numbers when the 2005 request was made. The best solution to the deadly roadside bombs planted by insurgents was to add extra layers of steel to the less sturdy Humvee, they said.

"I don't think (the study) stands up to the facts about what we did, about what the industry was capable of doing and why we did what we did," Magnus told the newspaper in an interview. "I just don't think that's accurate."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon's No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007. Defense contractors are now producing close to 1,000 vehicles a month.

Gayl has clashed with his superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year. In his study, he recommended an inquiry be conducted to determine if any military or government employees are culpable for failing to rush critical gear to the troops.

"If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the (Marine Corps) is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented," Gayl said. "While the possibility of individual corruption remains undetermined, the existence of corrupted MRAP processes is likely, and worthy of (inspector general) investigation."

Sens. Joe Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., called for an investigation after reviewing Gayl's report.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the nation's oldest veterans organization, said if Gayl's allegations are true, charges should be brought against the military and civilian officials who failed to deliver the MRAPs.

If, however, Gayl's findings are incorrect, he should be held accountable for his actions, said VFW National Commander George Lisicki in a Feb. 19 letter to members of Congress.

"There is no doubt MRAPs have saved many lives in horrendous (improvised explosive device) explosions, but to accuse the Marine Corps of knowingly and intentionally jeopardizing the safety of fellow Marines on the battlefield is a very serious charge," Lisicki said.

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The Arabs

Between fitna, fawda and the deep blue sea
Jan 10th 2008 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

Why George Bush, touring the Middle East this week, is finding the Arabs in a gloomy mood
IT IS not easy to be an Arab these days. If you are old, the place where you live is likely to have changed so much that little seems friendly and familiar. If you are young, years of rote learning in dreary state schools did not prepare you well for this new world. In your own country you have few rights. Travel abroad and they take you for a terrorist. Even your leaders don't count for much in the wider world. Some are big on money, others on bombast, but few are inspiring or visionary.

Reuters

These are gross generalisations, of course. Huge differences persist among 300m-odd Arabic speakers and 22 countries of the Arab League. With oil prices touching record highs, some Arab economies are booming. The gulf between a Darfuri refugee and a Porsche-driving financier in Dubai is as great as between any two people on earth. Yet to travel through the Arab world right now is to experience a peculiar sameness of spirit. Particularly among people under 30, who make up the vast majority of Arabs, the mood is one of disgruntlement and doubt.

Factors that contribute to the gloom include the discombobulating impact of one of the world's fastest population growth rates, failing public-education systems and the resilience of social traditions often ill-suited to the urban lifestyle that is now the Arab norm. But it is politics above all that shapes this generation's discontent.

In the world at large, things have not looked good for the Arabs for a long time. The generation that emerged after the second world war came to believe in the inevitability of an Arab renaissance after centuries of domination by Ottoman Turks and European imperialists. Within this scheme of Arab progress, the problem of Palestine stuck out like a troublesome nail. Defeat in the 1967 war with Israel shattered many dreams. Yet even after Israel's victory Palestine remained a touchstone for Arabs everywhere. Sooner or later, it was felt, justice would be done.

That confidence has taken a beating of late. Few Arabs expect the peace initiative George Bush launched in Annapolis last November to achieve anything. And the schism between Hamas and Fatah has shaken underlying assumptions. If the Palestinians cannot unite in their own cause, why should other Arabs help them? And which side to support? For fellow Arabs, as for Palestinians themselves, the clash between a heart that cries “resist” and a head that counsels compromise has seldom been more perplexing.

As in Palestine, so in Iraq. In 2003 America's invasion produced all but universal Arab outrage. From afar, Iraqi “resistance” looked both natural and noble. But as Iraq has grown messier, the rights and wrongs have grown harder for Arabs to disentangle. There are few heroes in a cast that includes mass killers from al-Qaeda, brutal Shia militias, criminal gangs, Kurdish separatists and corrupt politicians as well as the American occupiers.

Elsewhere in the region, it has become harder for thoughtful Arabs to blame the government-inspired slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan or the stalemate between Lebanon's religious sects on a nefarious American foreign policy. Many Arabs still see Mr Bush's “war on terrorism” as a crusade against Islam. But many also note that al-Qaeda-style jihadism has killed more Muslims, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to the squalid Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, than “infidels”.

In past decades, Arabs looked to leaders for guidance. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Tunisia's modernising secularist, Habib Bourguiba, and Kings Hussein of Jordan, Hassan II of Morocco and Faisal of Saudi Arabia were all flawed men. Yet they, and even monsters such as Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, enjoyed some popular appeal as nation-builders. Most of today's leaders, by contrast, lack an inspirational project. Nor is any single country a natural leader of the Arabs. Egypt under the 26-year-long rule of Hosni Mubarak is no longer the champion of “Arabism”. Saudi Arabia has vast oil wealth but a mixed record in diplomacy: its attempt last year to reconcile Fatah and Hamas unravelled with humiliating speed.

It may be a good thing that the personality-based leadership of the 1960s and 1970s has fallen out of fashion. Unfortunately, it has not been replaced by more institutionally-based systems of rule, let alone—for all the aid and speechifying of Western do-gooders—by democracy. Elections are more frequent and opposition parties and the press somewhat freer. But this is often a case of adopting the outward shape of reform without the substance. Regimes point to the existence of parliaments, while hiding the tricks used to pack them with friends and exclude real opposition. They can trumpet privatisation programmes that reduce the role of the state, while obscuring the fact that many of the beneficiaries are regime cronies.

The marginally freer press makes for more colourful news-stands. But some opening was probably inescapable, due to the impact of hard-to-block new media, via satellites and the internet. Governments have simply switched from absolute control of information, for example through state television monopolies, to enacting laws that criminalise “spreading false information” or “disrespecting state institutions”. The supposedly liberalising, pro-Western governments of Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt have all used such means to stifle dissent. Syria under Hafez Assad used to hurl dissidents into prison without much ado. His “modernising” son Bashar has them tried first. But they still end up in the slammer.

Stratagems such as these suck the vitality out of politics. Morocco is one of the bolder Arab reformers. Yet despite rising prosperity, a relatively free press and multi-party elections, Moroccans have grown increasingly sceptical of a political process that remains tightly, if elegantly, circumscribed. As a result, voter turnout has steadily declined over the past two decades. In Egypt, fewer than one in ten voters bothered to turn out for recent polls.

Political scientists have long blamed oil wealth—and the rentier economy that so often goes along with it—for the survival of Arab authoritarianism. No taxation without representation, said America's revolutionaries. Arab governments have inverted this refrain: by appropriating national energy resources and other rents, they neatly absolve themselves of the need to levy heavy taxes and therefore to win the consent of the governed.

The devil you know
A less obvious source of state power is a pervasive fear of what might happen in its absence. In many Arab countries loyalty to the state is weaker than loyalty to a sub-grouping based on kinship, ethnicity, religion or region. This is hardly a unique problem; many successful democracies still struggle with it. But Muslims have, in addition, yet to resolve the essential question of whether laws should emanate from the people or from God (see article).

Such points may seem abstract but they have practical consequences. In most Arab countries, regimes hold power by virtue of tradition or through military-backed movements that claim to represent the will of the masses. Where top-down authority collapses, as it did in post-Saddam Iraq or in the Palestinian territories after Arafat, it has been very hard for bottom-up politics to repair the damage.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that people prefer the devil they know to the fitna (communal strife) or fawda (chaos) that seem all too likely to replace it. This makes Arabs suspicious not just of Western advocates of democracy but also of parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocate change in the name of Islam. It is instructive to note that when such movements are confronted with bread-and-butter issues they tend to split between pragmatists and ideologues, leaving supporters befuddled. Even Egypt's highly disciplined Muslim Brothers, for example, are riven by tensions between older hardliners and younger liberals.

The bleakness of political prospects is only one aspect of the current Arab malaise. The rigid social structures and strong family ties that form part of the cohesive strength of Arab societies have negative consequences too. Sex out of wedlock remains taboo, yet the cost of lavish weddings, hefty dowry payments and the bridal requirement of a furnished, paid-for home have pushed the average age of marriage in many Arab countries into the 30s. The resulting frustration is an underlying cause of troubles from youth delinquency to religious extremism. Paternalistic social norms hold women back, even though their legal status is improving.

Let them learn about the world
Much fanfare has surrounded the release, over the past few years, of a series of UN-sponsored reports on human development painting a picture of Arab shortcomings that range from women's treatment to the feeble trickle of translation into Arabic of new knowledge. An oft-quoted statistic from the reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.

If there is a common thread in many of these failings, it is poor education. Studies show a strong link between levels of schooling and attitudes to women's rights. Harder to prove, but equally valid by anecdotal evidence, is a link between breadth of reading and tolerance of diversity. Religious texts still out-sell every other form of literature in most Arab countries. This may promote punctilious practice of the faith, but hardly equips people for a bewildering world of ever-increasing choice.

Although the proportion of Arabs with university degrees is growing rapidly, quality lags far behind. An annual ranking of the world's top 500 universities, compiled by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, includes only one Arab institution compared with seven universities in tiny Israel.

Some Arab governments are at last responding. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have hired well-known consulting firms to revamp public-school systems designed in the 1950s. Even Syria has relaxed the state monopoly of higher education. Private universities are flourishing everywhere, sometimes with generous state aid. Dubai's Sheikh Muhammad Maktoum has pledged $10 billion to create a foundation to advance knowledge. Saudi Arabia has committed some $3 billion to build what officials promise will be a world-class postgraduate institute that will be beyond the supervision of the religiously conservative education ministry, and where men and women will be allowed to mingle.

Another cause for hope, just now, is the rapid growth of most Arab economies. For each of the past six years the Arab world has, by some estimates, grown faster by at least a percentage point than the world as a whole. Record oil prices have helped a lot. So has demography: birth-rates are falling after a period of high growth, increasing the proportion of wage earners to dependants. This has boosted consumer industries, as have reforms to ease investment and trade. Give me five more years of 7% growth, one Egyptian minister is fond of saying, and many of our other problems will fade. Maybe.