Posted By Marc on February 7, 2010
John Stanton has just released a story at Cryptome that Issa T. Salome, a 60 year old HTT member, was kidnapped in Iraq by insurgents in January. John argues that this shows that the HTS is failing to find qualified candidates, train them properly and, then, guard them. Personally, I am not so sure about that given the lack of details surround how the kidnapping took place, but it certainly does highlight that being a member of an HTT is not a secure, restful and relaxing position.
Category: Human Terrain System (HTS) |
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Tags: Human Terrain System (HTS), Issa T. Salome
Posted By Marc on February 4, 2010
It’s been a busy, but stimulating, week so far. I just got back from a presentations on Canada’s Evolving Mission in Afghanistan, and I’m preparing to head down to Quantico on Sunday for an interesting workshop next week. This week and, to a lessor degree last week, have been quite synergistic in terms of my thinking about COIN. I’m not really ready to put down any models just yet, but I have been toying with some interesting questions.
Category: Anthropology, COIN |
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Posted By Marc on February 1, 2010
A week ago, I posted about the medium is the message vs. massage and used a couple of YouTube Videos from the Ottawa Back Choir as example. On Saturday, I was over for dinner at an old friend’s house and he showed me one of his favourite YouTube recording artists: Pamplamoose Music. As he showed me some of the videos, I started to understand what I was seeming – a truly brilliant use of the video medium that bypasses some of the sensory limitations.
Category: COIN, Communications Theory, Evolutionary Theory, Presentation & Performance |
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Tags: adaptation, Canadian Communications Tradition, New Media
Posted By Marc on January 29, 2010
Margaret Atwood was recently honoured with a Chrystal Award at the World Economic Forum. The true esteem in which the Arts are held by the WEF, however, was clearly shown in how they handled the acceptance speaches by the various winners: the canceled them.
I really can’t let this go by both as an Anthropologist and as a performing artist.
(more…)
Category: Uncategorized |
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Posted By Marc on January 28, 2010
In a recently released article in prospect magazine, Edward Luttwak argues that the US should adopt a “Byzantine” strategy in dealing with the Taliban. His suggestion is simple
With Afghanistan, the west faces a simple strategic calculus: too costly to stay in, too risky to leave. A Byzantine response would be, first to withdraw the west’s scarce, expensive troops, and arm local proxies instead.
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Category: COIN |
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Tags: Afghanistan, Byzantium
Posted By Marc on January 26, 2010
The Medium is the Massage
(no, that isn’t a spelling error), is the name of a rather famous work produced by Marshall McLuhan and Quenten Fiore in 1967. It is, in many ways, a popularizing, as well as exemplar, version of McLuhan’s major research focus on how media influences messages or, in it’s better known version, “the medium is the message”. But is it?
Category: Communications Theory, Music |
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Tags: Canadian Communications Tradition, Marshall McLuhan, Ottawa Bach Choir
Posted By Marc on January 25, 2010
My friend and fellow SWC denizen Mark Safranski (aka Zenpundit) has an excellent post today entitled The post-COIN Era is Here. It is, IMHO, an excellent post on the (supposed) “COINdinista vs. Big War” debate; a “debate” that exists more in the minds of the policy crowd that the actual debaters. Mark makes some really excellent observations in the post, but the one I would like to play off on is the following:
Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the ”targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.
Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it.
Category: COIN |
3 Comments »
Tags: COIN, COINdenista vs Big War, Epistemology, Ontology
Posted By Marc on January 24, 2010
A new briefing on how the Human Terrain System has surfaced in a story by John Stanton over at Cryptome (thanks for sending me the note, John!). As any of my students know, I dislike large powerpoint presentations and can spend hours talking about a single slide. This presentation, at 133 slides, is, IMO, somewhat mind numbing. as John notes:
They are audacious and excellent documents whose purpose seems to be to convince command and funding sources that HTS principals have been working since at least 2008 to improve recruiting practices (rigid check of qualifications), training methodologies (going Socratic, modular and phased) and logistics practices (housing, deployment, transport, move to Kansas City).
I must admit, the slide deck left me underwhelmed, most especially since everything listed in it should have been done at the start of the program.
(more…)
Category: Human Terrain System (HTS) |
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Tags: Human Terrain System (HTS)
Posted By Marc on January 22, 2010
Hugh Gusterson has a new piece over at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled An American suicide bomber? It’s worth taking a look at for a number of reasons. I think that the central reason I found it interesting was because Hugh presents a very nice cautionary tale about how forgetful people can be.
Category: Anthropology |
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Posted By Marc on January 15, 2010
A very interesting discussion is starting to heat up over at the Small Wars Council over a paper written by Matt Lauder called Religion and Resistance: Examining the Role of Religion in Irregular Warfare (March 2009, DRDC Toronto TN 2009-049; NB: originally posted by milNews.ca over at army.ca forums). I expect the discussion to expand quite a bit over the next few days. One of the reasons why the discussion is so interesting is that it is touching on some areas that are truly central to understanding the motivations and logics of people or, in other words, how people can “make sense” out of the weirdest things.
Category: COIN, Mythology & Narratives |
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