Many moons ago, I posed the question:

Is there a market for a monthly magazine that is a cross between Vogue and Foreign Affairs?

Well, I recently learned that Jezebel took a cut at what such a magazine might look like:

'Jane's Defence Weekly' is a weekly military mag covering topics pertinent to national and international defense and security, and the main reason our dad was impressed this one time we told him we were writing a story for 'Jane' magazine. Below, we take the pun wayyyy further than we ever probably should have by asking 'Jane's Defence Weekly' reporter Nathan Hodge to interpret world events in the flip, casual, sophomoric voice a 'Jane' reader would understand!

Here's a snippet:

Q: Angelina Jolie was just named to the Council on Foreign Relations. Do celebrities really help solve anything?
Hodge: I think Angelina Jolie would do a better job of winning hearts and minds then say, [former Bush flack] Karen Hughes, who recently did a a listening tour of the Middle East as the lead State Department outreach person for boosting America's image in the Middle East. It was a failure. The problem you have in the military is that there's a belief you can invent a ray gun that you can zap people with and they will like you. The way you want to go about solving conflicts it is by improving your information campaign--winning hearts and minds of people. It's like how we won the Cold War - we won because people didn't want to wear shoes made in Leningrad and wanted to listen to bootleg Deep Purple records.

Q: Are all the celebs trying to heal Africa right now, or are any of them digging missile defense?
Hodge: Do you know who Jeff Skunk Baxter is?

Q: Uh, no?
Hodge: He was in the Doobie Brothers. He's really into missile defense.

Q: Whoa, so he is! Weird.

Oh, Skunk rocks! I heard him rant about how electronic collaboration should be more like great jazz. (Or something. It was a while back.)

That's So Jane's! Miss Universe As A Metaphor For Geopolitics

Code is Law.

The idea of network-centric operations initially was inspired by developments in the IT-industry in the 1990s. But while today’s internet industry is happily nurturing a new boom revolving around Web 2.0, the defense establishment is haplessly managing counterinsurgency and stability operations. Yet a closer look at the two seemingly separate trends brings to light striking similarities. War’s changing character is not only augmented by the emergence of the new media; the way the web and today’s communication devices are used to organize lives also instructs our understanding of how killing is organized. The argument put forward here is that the web’s emerging organizing principles — including a social as well as a technological dimension — increasingly govern the management of violence. The new media consequently offer both a set of new metaphors to understand the character of today’s wars and a socio-technological platform that remodels the architecture of battle.

AJAX is Bad Law.

War 2.0

When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at th... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Open-Source Spying

Rather belatedly, the Army attempts to clear up some recent FUD (widely reported, including here) about SINCGARS.

US servicemembers can use the SINCGARS radio system with confidence.

Recent media articles [about Hezbollah's use of Iranian technology to defeat SINCGARS security] are wrong.

The Israelis do not use the US SINCGARS system, but rather they use another frequency-hopping technology.

"These articles lead people to think that SINCGARS is vulnerable, and that this technology is available to bad guys. This is not the case. The Israelis do not have SINCGARS radios. They have another frequency-hopping radio that does not have the US frequency-hopping algorithm, does not use the US communications security devices and does not use the US transmission security devices. All three provide robust protection for US SINCGARS."

It may still be safe, but it is certainly getting old, as this concluding remark, to his fellow soliders in the field, makes clear:

Bowden noted that he has been working on SINCGARS since the 1980s and can answer any questions about it.

SINCGARS Radio System Remains Secure

Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults, according to Hezbollah and Lebanese officials.

UPDATE: The Army says it just ain't so. Or, rather, the Army clarifies that the hacked radios were not SINCGARS.

Hezbollah cracked the code

The barriers to entry have dropped sufficiently so that, as long as anyone has the will to fight, they'll be able to continue fighting. I think that's the strategic picture that's most pertinent to our time."

What if the Iranians could launch swarms of hundreds of missiles simultaneously? All bets might be off. In such a scenario, the Iranians could conceivably devastate an American naval force. Do the Iranians possess enough missiles to do that? The truth is that we don't know. In the longer term, the trend seems clear.

This is the second half of an article recently discussed here.

The democratization of cruise missile technology, part II

Hezbollah's campaign is a clear sign of how the democratization of missile technology -- cruise missile technology, in particular -- is reshaping global realities.

"We are trying to wage war as if it still mattered that our forces are comprised of ‘the few and the large' -- a few large heavy divisions, a few large aircraft carrier battle groups -- when in fact war is migrating into the hands of the many and the small -- little distributed units. We live in an era when technology has expanded the destructive power of a small group and the individual beyond our imaginations."

The Lebanon War and the democratization of missile technology

Linton Wells, former acting CIO of the US Department of Defense, and currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration, will be speaking this weekend at DEFCON 14. You should find him and tell him about MemeStreams.

Experience from domestic and foreign humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations shows that shared situational awareness and the information systems that support it are the critical enablers of all other functions in such situations. They are not merely technical adjuncts to the delivery of food, water and shelter. Federal Agencies can respond better to disasters (both domestic and international) by sharing unclassified information effectively with state, local and tribal governments, non-governmental organizations, and relief entities. DoD often refers to these as "non-traditional partners." Besides sharing situational awareness, decision-makers also must exchange ideas for solving emergent problems and convert decisions into action. These capabilities need to be in place within hours after the beginning of a crisis. Success will require new cultures of unclassified information sharing; not just within DoD, but also with the non-traditional partners that form the backbone of domestic and international disaster response.

Earlier this year he participated in a panel session at the Federal CTO Summit:

WHAT WILL STREAMLINE INFORMATION SHARING AND ENSURE INFORMATION ASSURANCE?

As part of the President's Executive Order to establish an information sharing council there is an imperative to create an environment where information on terrorism is automatically shared among appropriate agencies. What are the current information sharing capabilities? What systemic changes need to be made to streamline this collaborative initiative?

Tom Noonan was a member of the panel that immediately preceded the one described above, in which Wells participated.

Former US DoD CIO to Speak at DEFCON 14

Paul Saffo calls it like he sees it.

Corporations and the military are at the point where they have extraordinarily powerful new tools, he adds, but to leverage that power they must think in radically new ways. "If you don’t do that, you are just paving the cow path. You’re wasting vast sums of money to do things in an old way, and you’re kidding yourself that you’re innovative."

Part of the challenge of changing how organizations operate is created by the term "network" itself. People think they have a common understanding of what the word means, but networks are not all equal, and over time the label evolves either into an invitation to think creatively or it becomes “intellectual wallpaper over unexamined assumptions.” This confusion contributes to making some unwise decisions when leaders come to believe that because they are networked, they are collaborating. But this is not always the case.

Moo.

Collaborative Technologies Demand Deep Change | SIGNAL Magazine

The Defense Science Board will conduct a summer study on a topic that would have been inconceivable when the Defense Department established the board 50 years ago this year: the military implications of Internet search engines, online journals and "blogs."

The terms of reference are available.

Defense Science Board to Study Impact of MemeStreams on War in Iraq