From the consistently useful Presentation Zen, a story from Japan:

Toyota Motor Corporation CEO Katsuaki Watanabe urged employees to show self-restraint and stop the wasteful practice of using PowerPoint for the creation of documents…

Note the Watanabe is not banning PowerPoint; he is rather encouraging employees to be intelligent and intentional about how they use their tools. PowerPoint is an appropriate tool for managing projected images to accompany a presentation. For clearly and concisely recording thoughts, however, it does a poor job relative to a one-page summary written in full sentences.

Garr sums up the issue:

The problem is that in Japan—like other places in the world—there is often no distinction made between documents (slideuments made in PowerPoint) and presentation slides prepared for projection. They are often interchangeable. Sounds efficient, right? And it would be funny if it was not so inefficient, wasteful, and unproductive. The slideuments produced in Japan make understanding and precision harder when printed.

Apparently a new uncontacted tribe was found in the Amazon. This isn’t my area, but the article makes it sound like Brazil tries to follow some variation of The Prime Directive, leaving tribes “uncontacted” (aside from the overflights) and protecting them from encrochment.

Paul DePodesta is the first baseball exec I know of to start blogging. An interesting development to watch (especially as a counterpoint to other communities *ahem* that are wrestling with how to adopt blogs).

An interesting TED presentation by Dr. Seyi Oyesola about how to improve health care in Africa. The problem set - delivering basic services when electricity and supplies are unreliable - has a great deal in common with that posed by post-disaster and post-war environments.

Taking a moment to stop and remember the fallen.

Another great example of the intersection between the green power movement and the development of SysAdmin capabilities: an unmanned airship that provides mobile support infrastructure for disaster relief and remote communities, generating renewable energy and supplying communications links where they are needed most.

There is even a ready-for-powerpoint-ranger-use presentation.

Read a summary.

Some details:

Though the airships are small by blimp standards, only 20 m long, they can house about 120 square meters of CIGS solar cells, producing up to 125 kWh / day. That’s enough energy to power 25 shallow water pumps, providing clean water for up to 12,000 people. Or enough to power 400 medical refrigerators.

The airship will fly in it’s own power box (also containing anchoring mechanisms) that will be lowered when the disaster site is reached. Additionally, the vehicle flies autonomously, and can be delivered entirely unmanned, simplifying the diplomatic process of serving aid, which, as we saw in Burma, can be a huge problem.

Following up on the terminology of the Long War, here are some more details on the NCTC memo:

“Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims,” says officials should use “terms such as ‘death cult,’ ‘cult-like,’ ’sectarian cult,’ and ‘violent cultists’ to describe the ideology and methodology of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”

How about calling them “global salafi militants”?

FPRI offers window into Robert Kaplan’s current thinking. His ultimate conclusion: we’re returning to “a world of 19th-century balance of power on several different levels.” What I found most interesting, however, was the implied commentary on strategic trade-offs, force composition and force planning questions.

Kaplan emphasized navies because right now the U.S. is obsessed with low-tech land wars, even though 70-80 percent of all goods and commercial items in this globalized age travel by sea.

Contained within “obsessed” is a melange of half-truths and vague assertions. The US is devoting considerably more attention to counterinsurgency and SSTR than it was seven years ago, but then it was devoting hardly any attention to COIN in 2000. The description is also misleading because the DoD budget remains strikingly unobsessed with low-tech wars.

Counterinsurgency will certainly play a part in America’s future, he said, but probably only a part.

This is a complete strawman; no one argues that counterinsurgency will be the entirity of America’s future.

We’re well into the thick of the fight over the defense establishment’s capability portfolio for the 21st Century. Legacy interests use a host of arguments to make COIN and low-tech, low-intensity warfare sound like it has been over emphasized. So you’ll read lots of articles warning that SSTR is “only a part” of the future missions set (a statement no one argues with), or that current conflicts don’t represent future conflicts, or that we’ve dangerously neglected our traditional hard-power assets with an excessive focus on COIN. “Procurement holidays” and “neglected threats” figure prominently in these arguments.

Service culture, rivalries and inertia play a large role in all of this, as do organizational dynamics. One cannot understand the shape of the debate without including these dimensions.

The debate needs to establish the relative importance of these capabilities. Sure, in a perfect world it would be great to have a 600 ship navy with the latest technology, a 1,000,000 strong army with soldiers specializing in every form of operation from SSTR to traditional armor-heavy engagements with high-tech adversaries and an air force fielding cutting-edge UAVs and UCAVs while also deploying 5th generation fighters while researching their 6th generation replacements. But strategy is all about trade-0ffs, relative importance and setting priorities. This article makes it seem that Kaplan sidesteps these - the most important questions - with vague simplifications. One could devote billions to returning America’s submarine industry to its Cold War peak. Or those billions could be spent on UCAVs. Or on expanding Army end-strength. The question for a strategist is, which one makes more sense?

In all of this, one of the dynamics to track is how the various services prepare and respond for the aftermath of Iraq. Do any of them take the SSTR mission seriously, or will they all work to expunge any trace of the experience and organizational adapatations from themselves (as they did after Vietnam)? Given how hostile existing organizational dynamics are to SSTR missions, if one does not argue aggressively for including these capabilities into future force planning, then one is tacitly supporting a complete return to traditional scenarios and priorities.