Transcript and slides posted from Leavenworth. Sort of like reading the script of a good play; if you’ve seen Barnett in action, you can plug in the voicetrack in your mind. If you’ve been keeping up with his work, you can skim it pretty quickly to pick out the new bits.

I like the bit about Hezbollah sizing our SysAdmin force: “You may not care for the tactics or the goal, but they will kill you and rebuild you better than anyone out there.”

And on connectivity, rule sets and plugging into globalization:

So I say we’re searching for an ISO 9000 series analogy here. The cookie cutter comes in just this respect. I make the analogy. You come to my subdivision and you want to build a house in my subdivision. I’m going to tell you what all the pipes and the standards and the codes are going to be. I am not going to tell you what kind of furniture to pick out or how to run your family. I’m going to tell you what the standards are so you can connect up, but I’m not going to preach to you about democracy or how to run your system or deal with religion or cultural identity within your community.

And on the relationship between a nation’s borders and its stability (the non-colloquial analysis, using some nice fractal techniques, can be found in Alesina, Easterly and Matuszeski’s paper):

An argument echoing Ralph’s points about remapping the world. A country’s capacity for stability following any sort of civil war or disaster directly equates to how squiggly its borders are. They’ve done this analysis. Africa is a good example. The more squiggly your borders, the more stable your society and government and polity. Why? If you’ve got squiggly borders, there must be some sort of natural line—mountain, river or something—or you must have fought some wars to make that thing squiggly. The straighter they are, the more likely it is that somebody else drew the lines for you. Forty-two percent of the lines inside of Africa are straight. They were drawn by the Europeans. Big surprise. So when we think about Africa coming online, I guarantee you there’s going to be a certain remapping process. Why? Seventy percent of the so-called bottom billion in the global economy—70% of the one billion out of six plus that are the most poor, 70% of them are in interior countries in Africa. None of those countries should have been created. They really shouldn’t have. They’re not sustainable. The reality is you’re going to see a remapping process. It’s going to come about through a variety of means, but somehow those countries are going to become economically, politically networked in terms of their connectivity towards the coast. That process in many instances is going to be violent. Think about the United States. You can see the pattern pretty quickly. Here’s the original 13 colonies. Fairly squiggly. Defined mostly by the coast. Look how we settle the trans-Appalachian west. Two big dividers—basically, the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. Then look how easy it got after the American civil war. Notice how they get so straight and kind of boxy looking. Same basic process.

Regarding Ahmadinejad’s popularity, after being overruled by Khamenei on a gas supply law:

Critics of the president have become more vocal as the threat of war with the US or Israel over Iran’s nuclear activities appears to have receded.

H/T TPMB

Robert Zarate has a fascinating post exploring a 1957 memorandum by Herman Kahn and Irwin Mann Ten Common Pitfalls. Kahn and Mann explore common mistakes that policy analysts run into as they conduct studies. Kahn’s accompanying illustrations alone make the read worthwhile. His sketch for the pitfall of “modelism,”for example, speaks for itself:

Though the tools available to operations research and systems analysts have improved exponentially since 1957, the methodological challenges of conducting useful defense policy research have remained quite stable. A deep familiarity with the work of the founders of the discipline, then, is an indispensable part of any analyst’s training.

Middle class Chinese protesters use smart mob tactics to stage protests:

The sudden “strolls” by thousands of office workers, company managers, young families and the elderly in this sleek financial hub are the latest chapter in a quiet middle-class battle against government officials…[demonstrators] in Fujian province, relied on the Internet and cellphone text messaging to organize strolls and other opposition.

The protesters use open-source collaboration methods, a la Global Guerillas.

The growing boldness of the protesters has prompted city officials to emphasize that residents should find “normal” channels to vent their unhappiness. “We will forestall and defuse social tensions,” Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng said in his annual government report Thursday, in what appeared to be a tacit nod to the protesters’ concerns.

After each stroll, residents upload photos and videos to Chinese Web sites, which are often blocked by the government, and to YouTube, a site that isn’t. The project has turned neighbors who did not know each other into close friends and allies who now compare notes and strategize.

“They can’t arrest everybody,” said Yao, a 58-year-old protester who asked that his full name not be used because he is a manager at a state-owned enterprise.

Read the whole thing.

Robert Zarate has given AlbertWohlstetter.com a serious make-over, making it a valuable resource for the strategic thinking of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter.

After reviewing a litany of current geopolitical concerns, Zarate points out that

These are some of the very same strategic challenges that Albert James Wohlstetter (1913-1997) and Roberta Mary Morgan Wohlstetter (1912-2007) anticipated decades ago. Over the course of their nearly fifty-year careers in strategy, the Wohlstetters produced hundreds of writings that analyzed strategic policy issues including Persian Gulf instabilities, America’s energy vulnerabilities, the military potential of civilian nuclear energy, nuclear proliferation, nuclear and non-nuclear deterrence, missile defense, alliance dynamics and cohesiveness, and violent extremism.

By and large, though, Albert and Roberta’s writings remain widely dispersed, poorly cataloged and, in many cases, difficult for all but the most determined and resourceful to find. As a result, those interested in learning more about the Wohlstetters–a group that includes not only decisionmakers and policy analysts, but also journalists, academics and students–have not been able to read first-hand their writings. Instead, they often have had to rely on books and articles that offer second-hand (in some cases, even third-hand) accounts of Albert and Roberta’s works.

It is long overdue for the thinking of these great American strategists to receive broad and nuanced attention. Many thanks to Robert for his efforts in changing this.

In the kind of post that represents the best of the open-source analysis blog community, FAS’s Strategic Security Blog discusses the limited patrols of the PRC’s sub fleet. Using data obtained through FOIA requests from the US Navy, Hans Kristensen generated the following summary:

Chinese Submarine Patrols 1981-2007

While some of these patrols have sparked a great deal of attention, Kristensen argues that the low overall patrol rate (an average of 3.4 patrols a year from a sub fleet of 50) demonstrates that the PRC’s submarine force remains a costal defense force.

China’s SSBN fleet has not yet conducted a single deterrence patrol, even though the Xia (Type 092) has been in service for 25 years and the first of the Jia-class (Type 094) was launched in 2004.