Mail 682 Sunday July 10, 2011
Subject: Thank you sir!
Dr. J,
I must say that you are my main news-source in the low-bandwidth wasteland of Afghanistan… Keep knocking away with that WordPress stuff, I wish there was an alternative that was working better for you, but for the record, it is good enough for me (even if I prefer the old look, it just isn’t going to happen so we deal with it.)
A fellow soldier from the Dominican Republic(DR) and I were talking about military discipline in the US Army. He was an officer in the DR prior to joining the Army and he mentioned today that he was amazed to see enlisted speaking to officers not at the position of attention, or lower enlisted speaking to NCOs not at the postition of parade rest.
I had the idea that this was a result of the soldier to civilian ratio between the two countries. We back-of-the-enveloped the DR at 50k military to 5mil civilian, and the US at 2.5mil military(with reserves/ng/irr) to 250mil civilians. Or about .5% DR military participation to 1% US military participation.
I went a bit off track, but my theory on discipline at the end of this discussion (carried on while working on the helicopters) was that the larger per capita demands of the US military, and retention needs were the main reasons that he didn’t see the strict military discipline he was used to seeing in other militarys around the world.
In short, somewhere around a half percent of a population would stick around and make a career out of the military and if force demands are one percent of population things like this lack of military discipline will be seen.
I don’t mean lead you to believe that my unit or the Army in general lacks discipline; when something needs to get done, it happens, and quickly.
This coversation was about what he perceived to be an overabundance of familiarity. "Even if I had served with them for fifteen years I still didn’t know their first name," was a comment of his.
When I first joined up I expected an Old School experience, and through my initial training I disappointed with the apparent lack of rigor. I was amazed that NCOs couldn’t give wall to wall counseling sessions anymore, or that after a certain period of time you might talk to your First Sergeant at anything other than a position of parade rest &c…
I am somewhat used to this familiarity now, and this conversation got me to thinking about pros/cons.
Does this familiarity we have with each other in an operational setting actually enhance our capabilities? It seems to promote a ‘top-down/bottom-up’ level of communication that a strictly ‘top-down’ discipline may not.
I was reminded of your idea for a leaner military and wondered if this familiarity would decrease as the force gets smaller or if the familiarity is the special something that the US has that others don’t.
I believe my need for sleep has made me lose track of where I was going with all this. I had some notion that this somehow related to Republic vs Empire. A military that wants to adapt might be well served by a slight relaxation of military discipline?
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Thanks for the kind words.
You ask for more than I can give in a short answer; it is one of the most important questions of the times, or of all times. The Republic is in a critical period, with little holding it together, and among the Legions, while old fashioned patriotism that inspired American armies from the times of Valley Forge is growing thin. Political correctness has corrupted much of the officer corps. Fighting men know what they fight for; those who have not that experience generally have fancies, but they don’t know. But yes, it has a very great deal to do with Republic and Empire.
One of the best and most important books on this is Joseph Maxwell Cameron, The Anatomy of Military Merit. Unfortunately it is long out of print and I don’t know how it can be made available. My copy was copyrighted in 1960. Cameron was born in 1905. I do not know when he died, or who might own the copyright if one is still extant. Books like this would have been available under the Google/Author’s Guild settlement, but the courts threw that out. Cameron has much to say about the place of discipline.
Genuine discipline is related to formal discipline, just as ceremonies like standing retreat and military parades have relationships with genuine discipline but they are hardly the same thing. The art of subordinating the unmatched power of the military to the Republic is one of the dread secrets, and it is being lost to the same forces what allowed a mortal enemy of the Republic to become a promoted officer who could shoot down as enemies those who were his patients and comrades. “Cracking down” doesn’t solve that problem.
It is also important to note that Legions and Constabularies are not the same force, and require different disciplines.
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Esther Dyson video interview on the future of space travel.
<http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/08/esther-dyson-space/>
Roland Dobbins
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Since you’re now exploring WordPress, I decided it was time for me to get on the train. I had been running a vanilla-flavoured WordPress blog for a couple of years, but with little content to see what the hackers would do to it. During last week, I moved my old blog to it <http://crowan-scat.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/ViewFromEngland/>, and in the process learned quite a bit about WordPress. CJ Cherryh suggested Atahualpa or Constructor, and I found I prefered Atahualpa. She also suggested enlarging the avatars. To set up the tag cloud took a bit of doing. I eventually decided to use Better Tag Cloud which allowed me to set the separator between tags to a space. I also decided to use Faster Image Insert to allow me to upload my photo galleries more quickly.
The Independent looks at American politics: <http://tinyurl.com/6dkfwgr>
UK universities finally must publish their entrance requirements: <http://tinyurl.com/6yrpxjj>. They also may abandon their obsolete honours degree-classification system. <http://tinyurl.com/5tn2fad>
Ongoing debt crisis: <http://tinyurl.com/6zpz7da> <http://tinyurl.com/6cruz8s>
Upcoming near miss by (very small) asteroid: <http://tinyurl.com/6kosp4m>. This one will be approaching closer than our cloud of geostationary satellites.
Tyrannosaurs hunted in packs: <http://tinyurl.com/5rbksfn>
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"We do not understand how a country,… can produce people who seem to be acting without thinking, let alone making serious efforts to investigate the consequences of their actions." (Mary Evans in the Times Higher Education)
Harry Erwin
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Canadian Meteorite Has All the Building Blocks for Life.
<http://io9.com/5810426/canadian-meteorite-has-all-the-building-blocks-for-life>
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Roland Dobbins
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Subject: School teacher arrested
A public school teacher was arrested today at John F.
Kennedy
International airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General Eric Holder said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement.
He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
‘Al-Gebra is a problem for us’, the Attorney General said. ‘They derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values.’ They use secret code names like ‘X’ and ‘Y’
and refer to themselves as ‘unknowns’, but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, ‘There are
3 sides to every triangle’.
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Obama said, ‘If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes.’ White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President – It is believed that another Nobel Prize will follow.
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Now that’s bitter!
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New VTOL design –
Hi Jerry!
Here’s an interesting new design in VTOL aircraft.
http://www.gizmag.com/d-dalus-uav-design/18972/
Thanks for doing all you do so we don’t have to!
E.C. "Stan" Field
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What we might want in Afghanistan
Dr. Pournelle,
One comment on your idea that there is nothing Afghanistan makes or has that we need.
There are substantial deposits of LITHIUM and other rare-earth’s that are going to become essential to the long term construction of modern electrical infrastructure. Right now CHINA ( the red menace we have turned into a friend, why?) owns or
controls access to 95% of the raw LITHIUM resources currently known. They are building a road into Afghanistan to begin development of those assets once we are gone. I suspect they are one "empire" that might just be able to do what
no one else has done- conquer the area.
On another note- have you ever looked at the potential of the LFTR ( Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) technology to power the US? IF we would get off our butts and build a few of these power plants things might just turn around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_724593
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Best regards,
Paul R. Cole
Of course there are metals in Afghanistan, but that is a very long way from the United States. We can easily get oil out of Iraq, but we don’t have the will: do you really believe that we will fight China and Russia and Pakistan over Afghan minerals? It would be cheaper to go to the Moon for them.
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They don’t even know they are wicked.
Greetings, Dr. P
I was re-reading some of L. Frank Baum’s works, and this struck me as relevant:
A curious thing about Ugu the Shoemaker was that he didn’t suspect in the least that he was wicked. He wanted to be powerful and great, and he hoped to make himself master of all the Land of Oz that he might compel everyone in that fairy country to obey him, His ambition blinded him to the rights of others, and he imagined anyone else would act just as he did if anyone else happened to be as clever as himself.
Sound familiar?
Familiar indeed, alas.
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Waves of Political Violence
Regarding the popular actions from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur
I am minded of John Lukacs’ book The Passing of the Modern Age, in which he discussed how Popular Sovereignty had been displacing the State as the basis of authority, so that even tyrants felt the need to proclaim themselves the embodiment of the People’s Will. Both Mussolini and Hitler based their authority on being the Leader of a Folk and not the Head of a State. In the course of it, he mentioned that the increasing unwillingness of States to order the guns and fire on their people would eventually tip over into mass actions which States would feel helpless to address. "How the greatest States, having accumulated unequaled powers, suddenly have found that they are becoming powerless." He foresaw large groups of people simply "sloshing across the borders" with no one to stop them, and a breakdown in State authority. All very prescient for a book written in 1970. Surely there must be a middle ground between the current impotence and Napoleon’s "whiff o grapeshot." Or must there? If 99.9% of the people are content to stay quietly at home, but 0.1% realize that the government dare not give them a whiff of the grape, what will ensue?
MikeF
A Republic need not fear this sort of thing; but we now live in a different world. Have you noted that the SEIU members always get paid no matter what? The way to balance a budget is always to increase revenue, or so it seems; the inspectors of bunny rabbit licenses will be paid. That continues until — until what?
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If Iran can seal its border, why can’t we?
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iran/articles/20110707.aspx
"July 2, 2011: The government announced that 90 percent of its 1,800kilometer long eastern border has been sealed. The remaining portion, in the southeast along the Pakistani frontier, would be sealed in three years. This effort began in the early 1990s, as part of an effort to keep Afghan opium and heroin from getting in. Nearly 4,000 police and Revolutionary Guards have been killed since then, either by Afghan smugglers bringing drugs in, or shooting at those building the fence that has been built along the border. But the drugs still get in, as Iran has over two million addicts. The media and street chatter is full of stories about the tragic impact of the Afghan opiates. On the plus side, a lot of young people who would be out in the streets trying to change the government, instead get high."
So they can afford it and we can’t?
Ed
That’s about the size of it. It’s a matter of will.
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Copyright Re-Education? Yikes!
Oh my Lord – now the movie studios and major ISP’s, like AT&T, have decided that they can force customers to attend re-education sessions about copyrights. Well, maybe that is a little bit of an unfair description, but not much.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235261/isps_fight_piracy_meet_the_six_strikes.html
ISPs Fight Piracy: Meet the Six Strikes
By Ian Paul <http://www.pcworld.com/author/Ian-Paul> , PCWorld http://www.pcworld.com/ Jul 8, 2011 7:30 AM
The entertainment industry and major U.S. Internet Service Providers have concocted a new "six strikes" plan http://www.pcworld.com/article/235253/copyright_cops_team_with_isps_to_crack_down_on_music_movie_pirates.html?tk=rel_news to combat, educate and punish people sharing copyrighted files online. Major entertainment companies including EMI, Sony Music, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Music, Universal Studios, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Music, and Warner Bros. are betting that the new process could reduce illegal file sharing by as much as 70 percent.
The new plan was announced Thursday under the banner of the newly formed Center For Copyright Information http://www.copyrightinformation.org/ . The agreement is relatively close to rumors about a new antipiracy plan http://www.pcworld.com/article/230954/isps_may_join_fight_against_piracy.html?tk=rel_news that were circulating in late June.
Based on CFCI guidelines, online pirates who persist in sharing copyrighted music, movies and television episodes will be sent a series of six increasingly severe alerts from their ISP. The alerts ultimately include punishments such as bandwidth throttling, temporary suspension of service, and copyright reeducation. ISPs signed up for the plan include AT&T, Cablevision Comcast Time Warner, and Verizon. Victoria Espinel, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, expressed support for the plan on The White House blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/07/working-together-stop-internet-piracy .
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Migration patterns
You might find this interesting:
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Tim of Angle
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