The Juice Analytics Blog (excellent reading for all Excel jockeys) has an interesting post responding to Noah’s now infamous Wired article about NCW and CPOF in Iraq.

Putting aside the assessment of NCW’s role in OIF, the Ken says there are two types of solutions:

(1) “high tech”, focused on tools, and
(2) “high touch”, focused on interpersonal communications.

I’d go even further and say that most striking successes involve high tech tools being used with a high touch sensitivity. As I’ve said before, an analyst’s skill in facilitating meetings and eliciting information is usually the deciding factor in whether a tool or model produces anything helpful.

A prerequisite, of course, is having analysts who are technically and mathematically literate enough to translate the information they gather into the tool, but this shift is already occurring due to the growing segment of digital natives in the workforce. Doing one’s own data manipulation will become as expected as doing one’s own word processing. Citing one’s skill with Excel on a resume will become as outdated as listing how many words per minute you can type. Many have already reached this point. The expectation must become that of course you can manipulate your data - otherwise you won’t be able to spend enough time actually dealing with the material and will get bogged down in meetings with people who will process the material for you.

At my old job I called myself the “Excel Ninja,” because I enjoyed figuring out how to move unformatted or non-uniformly formatted data into whatever format was needed at the moment. It wasn’t in my job description, any more than typing up my own reports was, but it made me significantly more productive because it meant that I almost always avoided the fat-finger data-entry game. Even if I spent an afternoon writing a macro to process a data set, it was far better than the alternative.

Most will tell you that the information age economy requires a work-force well educated in technology (one can’t write about such things without genuflecting to this thesis). While this is true, the information age economy also requires a work-force able to think creatively and apply those technical skills to the challenge at hand. Churning out narrowly-specialized engineers won’t answer the mail anymore than a legion of classics scholars will.

To paraphrase a description of how John Nash solved problems in grad school, the information age economy belongs to liberal arts cross-trainers who won’t scale the mountain everyone else is attempting to summit. Rather, they’ll climb some other peak and - almost as an afterthought - shine a light back at the adjoining mount.

Notes to self:
(1) Wing Woo on the Chinese economy
(2) Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) - insuring investors against political risk factors.

…but it doesn’t look like I’ll be about until next week.

The crunch continues.

George Friedman offers an interesting interpretation of the new NIE: it represents a political shift, not an intelligence revelation.

The NIE release represents a transformation of U.S. policy toward Iran.

…We do not know what caused the NIE to change its analysis. It could be the result of new, definitive intelligence, or existing intelligence could have been reread from a new political standpoint.

…The recent U.S. successes in Iraq, however limited and transitory they might be, may have caused the Iranians to rethink their view on dealing with the Americans on Iraq. The Americans, regardless of progress, cannot easily suppress all of the Shiite militias. The Iranians cannot impose a regime on Iraq, though they can destabilize the process. A successful outcome requires a degree of cooperation — and recent indications suggest that Iran is prepared to provide that cooperation.

…The NIE solves a geopolitical problem for the United States. Washington cannot impose a unilateral settlement on Iraq, nor can it sustain forever the level of military commitment it has made to Iraq. There are other fires starting to burn around the world. At the same time, Washington cannot work with Tehran while it is building nuclear weapons. Hence, the NIE: While Iran does have a nuclear power program, it is not building nuclear weapons.

…If this thesis is correct, then we should start seeing some movement on Iraq between the United States and Iran. Certainly the major blocker from the U.S. side has been removed and the success of U.S. policies of late should motivate the Iranians. In any case, the entire framework for U.S.-Iranian relations would appear to have shifted, and with it the structure of geopolitical relations throughout the region.

A similar thesis has been brought up elsewhere, such as by Robert Baer in Time. All in all, good news for those who’ve been waiting for an Iranian-US bargain to stabilize Iraq and move forward. Perhaps the two sides have successfully sent some signals and are slouching towards a deal.

Dr. Colin Gray has a provocative article (pdf) in the latest issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly:

The defense community has made the remarkable discovery that what in Britain we call grand strategy — in the United States, national security strategy — is a good idea. It always was.

No time to comment further right now, other than to point to this passage recall Dr. Barnett’s argument that the Powell Doctrine was a fancy way of saying “We Don’t Do Counterinsurgency:”

n Britain, we tend to use quarter measures when half measures are called for. In the United States, the error lies in the opposite direction. In the troubling words of that distinguished American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard, writing in the Weinberger-Powell era of the mid-1980s: “The United States is a big country, and we should fight wars in a big way. One of our great advantages is our mass; we should not hesitate to use it. . . . Bigness, not brains, is our advantage, and we should exploit it. If we have to intervene, we should intervene with overwhelming force.”

(H/T to the persistently interesting and NSFW Swedish Meatballs Confidential)

After moving himself onto a blog, Chet Richards has moved the influential DNI onto a blog.

I’d have linked to them anyway, but I especially had to since Chet has been gracious enough to place OSD on their blogroll. Many thanks!