****2009***

Happy New Year 2009

May we all rise to meet the challenges that await us in the new year.

T'was The Day After Christmas, and Reality Sets Back In.

Benjamin Franklin

No caption needed!

The blogworld was resplendent with Holiday and Christmas greetings this year. Those of us who blog, post a greeting and wishes for their friends and readers in lieu of sending the time tested greeting cards. One post caught my eye for it's simple message to make a difference in someones life.
Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions wrote this:

During this holiday season, I encourage you make a difference in someone's life. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Well done is better than well said." Franklin also said, "A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle," which is one reason why so many people who selfishly focus on "finding themselves" get lost in the process.

Read the whole post Happy Holidays.

Steve's post about so many people being selfishly focused on themselves casts it's shadow on something that Dan of tdaxp.com posted about the Competing Views of Education where he asks the question.

So should our education system concentrate on a ‘next generation’ of scientists and engineers, lawyers and MBAs, critical theorists and community activists, or something else?

Dan linked an article by Thomas L. Friedman: Time to Reboot America. Dan copied an important paragraph that explains what Friedman see wrong with Americans today. I think that Dan and Thomas Friedman are really on to something here. We as a nation need to reboot, or jump-start for those who are tech challenged. Living off the fat of the past half century has left us a nation of consumers, and micro managers, who have indulged in mental masturbation to achieve instant gratification at the cost of our souls and the financial future of our children and grandchildren.

Here is what Friedman thinks should be done.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

Friedman still thinks that American has the stuff to rise to the challenge.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Looking back two hundred and fifty years, Benjamin Franklin's words still ring true and are a guide for all to follow when charting their personal life's course. Some of our most trusted institutions have strayed from that path. We the citizens have a moral obligation to demand accountability and leadership that puts unselfishness first.

Merry Christmas To All and Peace on Earth

Warm wishes for a Merry Christmas to all those who have visited this page. May you all enjoy this holiday season and count the blessings of having the love of family and friends to warm your soul.

Launching A Different Kind of Bailout.

Clemson Class World War I

Shipbuilding program 1930's

Farragut class on review

Benson class

Benson-Gleaves Destroyers

By now everyone who is cognisant of current events knows that President Bush moved to loan tax dollars to GM and Chrysler in an effort to prop them up long enough to get a recovery plan implemented. Blog friend Dan at tdaxp.com had to say about the plan in Bush Bails out the UAW.

Dan begins:

I don’t doubt that the UAW bailout is good party politics; it forces then-President Obama (a Democrat) to decide between continuing yet another unpopular Bush policy or throwing yet more loyal supporters under the bus. It’s just bad for America.

And today, he has this to say in this post Bush bails out unions: Will Obama invest in the future?

Even though our current President chose bailing out unions and electric vehicles, startups, solar power, and building electric vehicles that would revolutionize logistics in the army, we get the same GM+UAW team that has hurt us so much.
Hopefully President-Elect Obama will be brave enough to stand up to ignorant and misguided environmentalists, and continue to support both ethanol, biodiesel, and other alternatives to gasoline.

I am sceptical of the ability of GM and Chrysler to have the guts or the UAW to have the decency to make the cuts to be able to make the product competitive. While pondering this end run around the will of the people as to how their tax dollars are spent I read something from Galrahn at Information Dissemination. His suggestion at first could be understood as a call by a naval centric website for more money to be devoted to shipbuilding. Don't Bail Out Automakers, Invest in Shipbuilding.

Gahrahn begins:

Canada is discussing an interesting idea for an economic stimulus package, they are directing money directly into shipbuilding programs as part of the package. I'm personally not a big fan of government stimulus packages, they don't work very well normally because bureaucracy gets in the way of building effective packages. The New Deal was a good example. As an often politicized project to stimulate the economy during a depression, depending upon your politics one can find arguments suggesting it was critical to the country overcoming the economic challenges of the time, or it was a failure because it prolonged the depression. Such massive government investment projects are never as simple as the political rhetoric allowed, a more detailed review notes some of it worked, some of it didn't.

What didn't work was investment in the service sector. If you look at spending as a tree, the services sector becomes a stick, output with no tangible product that builds larger networks of economic growth. The New Deal investments in manufacturing on the other hand tell a different story, that tree branches out in a number of ways as a manufacturing facility networks with suppliers, subcontractors, and science to produce products. In many way the manufacturing investments of the new deal led to high production rates and more efficiency, was successful in building economic stimulus across several sectors, and ultimately put the US in position to be highly competitive industrially just as WWII arrived. The New Deal sealed the deal for the United States before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

He closes with this:

I'd rather invest $35 billion into shipbuilding over the next 4-8 years of the Obama administration fixing that industry to be globally competitive than spending the same amount just to keep the automobile manufacturers in Michigan on life support for another year. The Coast Guard has extremely old ships is stretched thin right now, and could use the investment towards homeland security. The Navy has not retooled since the cold war, and is shrinking at an extraordinary rate.

In a time of global climate change on a planet covered 70% with water, in a time where the world will soon be competing for fresh water, in a time when the worlds population is growing at a huge rate but most people live in the littorals, and as world trade by sea has become the lifeblood of the global economic system it seems to me that investment in the nations maritime sector has never been more important to our long term national interest. The shipbuilding sector could also be the solution to the automobile industry problems as it relates to the workforce soon to face major cuts, after all the nation needs more than just frigates, and the need for ships like new ice breakers is just the tip of the iceberg, pun intended.

This got my history juices flowing and I decided to take a look at some of the New Deal shipbuilding that Galrahn referred too.

The follow link takes a look at Shipbuilding in San Francisco during and before World War II.

In the decade prior to 1940, America's shipyards launched only 23 ships. In the five years after 1940, American shipyards launched 4,600 ships. San Francisco Bay Area shipbuilders produced almost 45 percent of all the cargo shipping tonnage and 20 percent of warship tonnage built in the entire country during World War II. The war lasted 1,365 days. In that span of time Bay Area shipyards built 1,400 vessels--a ship a day, on average.

One pioneer Bay Area shipyard was Mare Island Naval Yard. It began with a single floating dry dock in 1854 and progressed rapidly as the only Navy yard for the Pacific Squadron and, in fact, the only repair facility on the entire Pacific Coast. In 1859, Mare Island launched its first ship, the paddlewheel wooden steamer USS Saginaw. In the years following, Mare Island Naval Yard built a score of vessels including tugs, colliers, barges, gunboats and, in 1883, the cruiser USS Mohican.

Compared to the big shipyards on the East Coast at Philadelphia and New York, San Francisco Bay's shipbuilding industry was minuscule in the early years of the 20th century. How was it possible that from this modest beginning, San Francisco Bay would emerge in World War II as an industrial giant? How was it possible to build so many ships in so little time? First and most vital was a nationwide commitment to win the war. All available resources were dedicated to that end. Industrial leaders and politicians had the good sense to recognize that only through cooperation could total victory be achieved. As a result, World War II shipbuilding was perhaps the greatest combined effort of government and private industry in the Nation's history.
The Bay Area was fortunate in one respect; two major local shipyards, Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation and Moore Dry Dock Company, had gained valuable experience in large-scale rapid production during World War I, and had on hand core management and labor groups when needed for World War II. Lessons learned during the first wartime shipbuilding program (1917-1922) had demonstrated to management what to do and what not to do. These two yards had long histories in steel shipbuilding and had managed to survive the depression years of the 1930s, a period when American shipbuilding all but ceased. In addition to these yards, Mare Island Naval Shipyard and Hunters Point Dry Docks provided well-established repair and shipbuilding facilities when the need arose. Navy contracts in the 1930s kept Mare Island capable of producing modern warships.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. He developed a life long love affair with the Navy that allowed him to incorporate shipbuilding into his New Deal projects and prepare the Navy for the growing threats from Germany and Japan in the 1930's.

Just one area where this program was most apparent was in building new classes of destroyers to replace the large classes built during World War I. These early ships were known as "Four Stacker's" made up of the following classes, Caldwell, Wickes, and Clemson.

Roosevelt began a new program to encourage the building a new class of destroyers. Ten classes and three sub-classes were designed and built in civilian and navy yards during the 1930's. A list of those ships reveal how each class was an attempt to improve on the last. Farragut, Porter, Mahan, Somers, Gridley, Bagley,, Benham, Sims, Benson, Gleaves (including Livermore and Bristol). New designs and weapons designed to preform the duel roles of surface and air defence. By December 7, 1941 most of the ships in these classes were either on patrol or would join the fleet in 1942.

To echo Galrahn's suggestion that we invest in shipbuilding programs is a wise one. The lessons about ship design and new propulsion systems is virgin territory that given the cost of fuel and environmental concerns can stimulate our nation and provide much needed jobs. The shipbuilding does not have to be all defense oriented, in fact shipbuilding techniques pioneered by American shipyards were copied and improved upon by shipyards in emerging nations like Japan, Korea and Taiwan after World War II.

UPDATE:

From the keyboard of Galrahn at Information Dissemination, comes this further comment about shipbuilding.

Shipbuilding... At All Costs

Chimerica? A Team of Rivals?

Ever since President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972. The door has slowly opened and like it or not the world has become a safer place. Our arch enemy since the Korean War became a major trading partner and eventually underwriting our debt. Our economies are intertwined so much that to break those bonds would almost ensure a mutually assured destruction of the world's economic health.

Thomas Barnett author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush has a really forward looking post up today East and West, intertwined and imperative in which he describes his reaction to an article in Asia Times Online.

This is a very good but complex description (in the aggregate) of the nature of East-West financial/trade ties over the past years, with a prescription that makes sense regarding the future of U.S.-Chinese strategic cooperation. Without using the same words, its vision matches up nicely with mine in Great Powers--the notion of a "team of rivals" in diplomacy and a coordinated "race to the bottom of the pyramid" as a way to reorder global trade patterns (getting away from just the tremendous treadmill of China selling to us and buying our debt with its surplus) so as to close the Gap by having New Core powers like China integrate Gap economies into their buyer and producer chains and attracting Western competition in the same.

....In effect, what this piece says is that the globalization model of the past quarter century that saw America provide virtually all the global Leviathan services and the lion's share of consumer demand (an implicit Marshall Plan) is broken (I prefer the term, "consummated" or "completed"). But no matter the term you use, it has come to its useful end, this model. We can't take on more debt nor more global security burden--we are tapped. These are my essential arguments in Great Powers.

Barnett confronts the fear that many are having about the direction of the economy and America. He answers that fear this way.

Now I feel completely empowered across the board, and I no longer fear the subprime System Perturbation's play in my model of the future (fear, to me, is always a matter of not knowing how to integrate). Deep down, when you think about alternative global futures, you always know that the big facilitators are going to be scary crises. That's just the way it is. People will not change on the basis of frantic warnings during calm times, but they will change on the basis of calm warnings during frantic times.

Bottom line: if you want to be a grand strategist, you have to welcome the frantic times. No tumult, no play. And no play, no real structural change.

Part of what Tom is writing about is a vision expressed in this article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Wanted: A New Grand Strategy,

Grand strategy sounds like an abstract concept—something academics discuss—and one that bears little relationship to urgent, jarring events on the ground. But in the absence of strategy, any administration will be driven by the news, reacting rather than leading. For a superpower that has global interests and is forced to respond to virtually every problem, it's all too easy for the urgent to drive out the important.

Strategy begins by looking at the world and identifying America's interests, the threats to them and the resources available to be deployed. By relating all these, one can develop a set of foreign policies that will advance America's interests and ideals. When the unexpected happens, one can respond in ways that are aligned with these broader objectives. One uses the urgent to pursue the important. Or, to put it another way: never let a crisis go to waste.

Zakaria ends on this note by encouraging President-elect Obama to seize the moment.

This is a rare moment in history. A more responsive America, better attuned to the rest of the world, could help create a new set of ideas and institutions—an architecture of peace for the 21st century that would bring stability, prosperity and dignity to the lives of billions of people. Ten years from now, the world will have moved on; the rising powers will have become unwilling to accept an agenda conceived in Washington or London or Brussels. But at this time and for this man, there is a unique opportunity to use American power to reshape the world. This is his moment. He should seize it.

In a companion piece in Newsweek, Richard N. Haass China: Don’t Isolate, Integrate calls on America to invite China into the tent, as a way of confronting the problems that Tom Barnett has been writing about for the past decade.

The single most important challenge for the new administration—one with the potential to shape the 21st century—is China. As goes China, so go 1.3 billion men, women and children—one out of every five people on the planet.

China's economy is now roughly half the size of America's; in three decades, the two are likely to be about equal. What the Chinese eat, how much (or whether) they drive, where and how they choose to live, work and play: all will have an enormous impact on the availability and price of energy, the temperature of the planet and the prosperity of mankind.

Beijing's foreign policy is no less important. A cooperative China could help stem the spread of nuclear materials and weapons, maintain an open global trading and financial system, secure energy supplies, frustrate terrorists, prevent pandemics and slow climate change. A hostile or simply noncooperative China, on the other hand, would make it that much more difficult for the United States and its allies to tame the most dangerous facets of globalization. But the emergence of a cooperative China is anything but inevitable. That is why Washington needs a new approach to Beijing. Think of it as "integration."

Integration should be for this era what containment was for the previous one. Our goal should be to make China a pillar of a globalized world, too deeply invested to disrupt its smooth functioning. The aim is ambitious, even optimistic, but not unrealistic.

Much of what Haass and others have written, is countered by those who say we can not trust China now any more than the generation of our grandparents could trust Germany in the 1930's. During that time we never were able to influence Germany to change her ways before the world went over the cliff. Today, our best hope is to take the experiences we have learned from our past and practice pragmatic diplomacy, using trust, but verification as Reagan used to say, to ensure that our security and prosperity is protected through the strength of our people to innovate and adopt to a changing world.

Haass's final words are as cautious, as they are optimistic.

Even if all this happens, China and the United States aren't likely to become allies. But they could build a relationship based on selective cooperation, complemented by an understanding to limit the fallout from their disagreements. Both countries have a stake in such an arrangement. Trying to bring it about—integrating China into the highest councils of the 21st century—should be a top priority for the new president and his team.

What We Fight For, and Why We Lead.

Where In The Hell Is Matt?

Books Authored by LtC Robert Bateman, USA

Economic Freedom Map 2008

Todays, two Americans, both great lovers of their country, take center stage here at HG's World. The first article is by Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Bateman, USA, who describes himself as an infantryman, historian and prolific writer. I admit that Colonel Bateman has ruffled my feathers a few times in the past, but this time he hit a homerun, and in the words of the editors of the SWJ Blog was "spot-on." I totally concur and recommend, What I Fight For by Robert Bateman.

The story in Bateman's words:

Recently on an e-mail based discussion group in which I participate, there was some extended debate about how much language training was enough and which was more important, language training or history/culture education, for deploying soldiers. It was an informed and interesting squabble, with practitioners from every American war since Korea piping in with opinions and points of evidence. Then one fellow, a former-soldier-turned-photojournalist named Jim, plopped down the Truth. His simple formulation? "It's a people thing."

Now I am not a big one for the whole "emotional" thingeemabob. In most debates I want footnotes, documentation, and fracking proof for everything. People who know my history know this about me. But there are limits, and Jim's simple statement hit the mark. Sometimes, some very rare times, you don't need proof. You don't need evidence. You need only know how to feel, and be human. Jim, I knew instantly, was right.

.....OK, so a few years ago this doofus Seattle kid, a 20 something named Matt, decided he wanted to see the world. He took off, and it being the internet age and all, he updated his friends with short snippet videos from all over. The hook was that all of his friends firmly believed that this fellow, Matt, was quite possibly the worst dancer in all of human history.

They were probably right.

But because young Matt had a sense of humor, the snippet videos he sent to his friends from around (that time) South and SE Asia, were all of him dancing his somewhat, ahhhh, unique "dance" in various locals.

Then somebody tied all the videos together. It went "viral"...meaning that people across the planet watched it. Millions upon millions of them. Including some very saavy marketers at an Australian gum company called "Stride." They wrote to Matt and said, "Hey mate, like to do it again on our dime?" So Matt went around the world again, doing his doofy dance. That video was even bigger. Matt was inundated with mail, and Stride saw a global marketing boost, so they (being Aussies) said, "Double down mate." And Matt fused the two...all of the e-mail he had from around the planet...people who loved his video, and a travel expense account that his unemployed butt could have never supported.

This video was the upshot: Where The Hell is Matt?

And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is what we fight for. Or at least it is one part of what I fight for. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the vision of the world that this dumb-ass, 20-something, no-talent Muldoon gave us through his genius is enough. Our world is farked up, or at least large parts of the world...the parts that we Soldiers (and our brothers, the Marines) see, are often farked up. But young Matt, with this effing magnificent, transcendent, unifying-the-whole-goddamned-planet vision, which he demonstrated to the world all by his lonesome far better (judging by the 26 million hits on this video) than DoD, or State, or than any part of our government ever has, is a vision of the planet that represents what I want for our collective future.

My friend Jim is right. "It's a People Thing."

I hope this is what you fight for as well. Regardless of your nationality.

Watch this video.

Colonel Bateman gets it totally right. The essence of this story goes hand in hand with this next post by Thomas Barnett in his weekly column. His topic is that America's role has not diminished so much that it is poised to reclaim the traditional role of moral leadership, that we have had for the past century.

Barnett begins:

Wise men tell Americans that our nation no longer leads this world: We bankrupted ourselves first ideologically through unilateralism, then militarily through "global war," and now financially through the debt crisis. Rising great powers, we are told, now lead the way.

But where do we locate this new leadership?

In Europe's self-absorption over its rising Muslim quotient?

In Russia's self-inflicted economic penance for its smackdown of Georgia?

In India's crippling obsession with Pakistan?

In China's super-cooling economy and the social unrest it'll trigger?

In Japan's - whatever Japan is doing nowadays?

So which foreign leader has captured the world's attention with his promise of changed leadership?

Read the whole column to find out.

Barnett: World still needs America to lead

Barnett closes with this observation:

We can't borrow any more and thus can't police anywhere else without a dramatic renegotiation of that great power compact.

Furthermore, both aging West and rising East must come together to create and nurture markets among globalization's bottom-of-the-pyramid populations, for there will be found, in China's and India's rural interior as well as Africa's untapped labor pools, tomorrow's dramatically expanded global middle class. That's where our economic competition with China truly lies: seeing who captures the most new markets in coming years.

In the end, this unfolding drama we call globalization cannot advance without its chronically ambivalent lead - its Hamlet. For, if America does not lead the world's great powers against today's sea of troubles, there will be no fortunes preserved - much less won - and only further slings and arrows to be suffered.

These two converging ideas represent the best America has to offer the world. The crusty, evidence demanding soldier-historian Bateman gets it. Barnett has been preaching this message for the past two decades. To see the pen and the sword both understand, that it is in the words of Bateman's friend Jim, "It's a people thing" the future however currently in doubt, will sail on and our human resilience will meet the challenge.

Words From Heros

Under Fire Afghanistan

Firefight Afghanistan

Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers

Mario Vittone, U. S. Coast Guard

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Heroic behavior in many corners of today's self indulgent world is looked upon as a fool's mission, lumped together with religion, scruples and honor. Our political leaders, from all stripes are tarnished with countless lapses in public trust. Our sports and entertainment icons are given a pass for every fax pas, no matter how despicable their behavior.

Doing your duty today is mostly given lip service and honors are fleeting, even for those described below. Posting their words here may be preaching to the choir, but the examples of heroism and wise words about leadership deserve every forum.

This first story is going to piss all over the shoes of late Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, and his Ratio of Fire theory, Fire Away.

John Wayne Lives!

As Ford and Staff Sgt. John Wayne Walding returned fire, Walding was hit below his right knee. Ford turned and saw that the bullet "basically amputated his right leg right there on the battlefield."

Walding, of Groesbeck, Tex., recalled: "I literally grabbed my boot and put it in my crotch, then got the boot laces and tied it to my thigh, so it would not flop around. There was about two inches of meat holding my leg on." He put on a tourniquet, watching the blood flow out the stump to see when it was tight enough.

Then Walding tried to inject himself with morphine but accidentally used the wrong tip of the syringe and put the needle in this thumb, he later recalled. "My thumb felt great," he said wryly, noting that throughout the incident he never lost consciousness. "My name is John Wayne," he said.

The battle described above began:

After jumping out of helicopters at daybreak onto jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the 12-man Special Forces team scrambled up the steep mountainside toward its target -- an insurgent stronghold in northeast Afghanistan.

"Our plan," Capt. Kyle M. Walton recalled in an interview, "was to fight downhill."

But as the soldiers maneuvered toward a cluster of thick-walled mud buildings constructed layer upon layer about 1,000 feet farther up the mountain, insurgents quickly manned fighting positions, readying a barrage of fire for the exposed Green Berets.

Read the whole story: 10 Green Berets to Receive Silver Star for Afghan Battle - Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post

The United States Coast Guard has served our country and come to the aid of those in need across the world since 1790. Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the Coast Guard posted the following essay on his personal web blog, it is written by rescue swimmer Mario Vittone and is about leadership, and the full measure of inspiration it takes to be an effective leader.

Inspired Action:

Inspired action is a totally different thing altogether. Inspiring is hard work. It takes time, and integrity, and effort. It's harder (way) than giving orders. For old "do it cause I say so" types it requires a sometimes painful change from believing your people work for you, to making them believe that you work for them. You do, you know...you do work for them. That was the subtle idea that I had missed. I thought it was my job to tell my guys what to do. But the primary job of a leader is to make them believe they should be doing it.

"You don't just do a mission, you believe in it."~Story Musgrave

The only way to create a truly great place to work is to ensure that each of the team members under you (read: next to you) are raging evangelists for the cause or...whatever your cause is.

The Power of Why:

This is where the harder work starts. This is where you learn why so many people are locked in the chain. Inspiration requires more work than giving orders does. If you have a hard time with that (the hard work part), remember that the reason you get paid more when you advance is because the work is supposed to be harder.

Read the whole post: Must Read from the Coast Guard

I have written before about service people doing their duty. The trait to be resilient is in our human DNA. These two brief examples of fortitude and insight have been replayed millions of times in human history. The above is a brief reminder that the ability to face challenges and think is built into every one of us.

Drug Wars, Corporate Welfare and Teaching Technê

Mexican Drug Cartels

The Real Deal

Classical World

Three subjects to occupy an evenings reading. First, is this from Strafor who files this report on Mexico's efforts to confront the drug cartels http://www.stratfor.com/.

Mexico’s war against drug cartels continued in 2008. The mission President Felipe Calderon launched shortly after his inauguration two years ago to target the cartels has since escalated in nearly every way imaginable. Significant changes in Mexico’s security situation and the nature of the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere also have occurred over the last 12 months.

In this year’s report on Mexico’s drug cartels, we assess the most significant developments of the past year and provide an updated description of the country’s powerful drug-trafficking organizations. This annual report is a product of the coverage we maintain on a weekly basis through our Mexico Security Memo and various other reports.

The subject covered include:

Mexico’s Drug-Trafficking Organizations

Calderon’s Success Story

2008: A Year of Flux

Changing Geography

Deteriorating Security

Looking Ahead

The whole story:

Mexico and the War Against the Drug Cartels in 2008

And this related article from the Christian Science Monitor, reminds us that long wars will eventually wear down some societies, to a dull point where they give way to the less painful path, only to fall off a cliff.

Mexicans Question President Calderón's Drug War

Mexico City - Five thousand, three hundred, and seventy-six people have been killed in Mexico's drug war so far this year, double the number from last year and more than all the US troops killed in Iraq.

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Is this what victory looks like?

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That's the question Mexico is grappling with two years after President Felipe Calderón took office announcing a massive military effort to dismantle drug trafficking organizations.

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My blog friend Dan, host of tdaxp.com has been diligent in following the latest attempted grabs by the domestic auto industry to slow their plunge onto the rocks of reality, (competition).

Here are two of his latest posts, Dan says in part:

There are two lines of argument I have read for the UAW Bailout. One is essentially Keynesian, and argues in these bad economic times, building a giant pit and hiding money in it would be a good move, so building cars no one wants is no worse.

Read more: Buy their cars, or they’ll take your money

Here is a tease about Dan's next post:

The interesting point is near the end, where he says GM is a victim of history in the choices those companies made in supporting the UAW:

Read more: GM: Gaining the political benefits, and Making you pay

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Lastly, Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers offers this opinion about the state of a classical education in our universities. Hanson, hits all the bases by pulling no punches in describing where he thinks our institutions have strayed away from their bedrock foundations built on a foundation classical thought.

Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.

But in recent decades, classical and traditional liberal arts education has begun to erode, and a variety of unexpected consequences have followed. The academic battle has now gone beyond the in-house “culture wars” of the 1980s. Though the argument over politically correct curricula, controversial faculty appointments, and the traditional mission of the university is ongoing, the university now finds itself being bypassed technologically, conceptually, and culturally, in ways both welcome and disturbing.

Read more: "Humanities Move Off Campus"

Two Great Christmas Gifts

With Christmas just a couple of weeks away here are two really worthwhile book recommendations that will stimulate your mind and open your eyes to the future, by reviewing the past.

Major kudos to Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions for this post. Steve writes about Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, on the release of his new book, The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World.

Steve links a review by Shelby Coffey III in the November 30, 2008 Washington Post, "Markets Don't Make Bubbles, People Do," and makes insightful comments about both the review and Ferguson's book.

A brief excerpt of Steve's post.

People choking in the grasp of the current financial crisis are wondering how we got in this position and what we can do about it. Ferguson's web site provides this synopsis of his new book:

"Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labour. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential back-story behind all history. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia.

...The importance of Ferguson's book is that it highlights how essential capital flows are for the success of globalization. The only way to bring millions of more people out of poverty is to create wealth. Ferguson's book explains why financial systems are essential in that endeavor.

Coffey's review noted these remarks made by Ferguson on MSNBC.

Ferguson is making the rounds with his new book, saying last week on MSNBC that the United States should follow up the G-20 Economic Summit with a "G-2" meeting with just the Chinese. The professor also winningly confesses that even he is confused about the thrust of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion rescue fund. Ferguson has, nonetheless, written an admirably illuminating book that will take its place beside such modern classics as John Train's The Money Masters, Peter L. Bernstein's Against the Gods, and Adam Smith's Supermoney.

Ferguson's comments about a summit with China mirror much of what Thomas Barnett has been advocating about locking China in at today's prices.

Read the whole post: Show Me the Money.

Niall Ferguson is one of my favorite authors, writing The War of the World and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire among other best sellers. His expertise in economic history, coupled with an amazing ability to be a great storyteller gives him two tools, that make him one of the important scribes of our time. Among his teaching positions he is also a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

His newly released book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is described this way on Amazon.

Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.

Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.

With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?

This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.

Based on my previous reading of Ferguson's work I hardily recommend this book to everyone who desires a clear understanding of the current times and how in the end, it is always the money that makes the world go around.

Ferguson's book should be have equal billing on any one's Christmas wish list alongside Thomas Barnett's book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to be published in February 2009. Tom recently posted the table of contents on his blog to give readers a road map of where he is going with his vision of grand strategy.

Great Powers Table of Contents and for more Great Powers material.

It is described this way at Amazon.

In civilian and military circles alike, The Pentagon’s New Map became one of the most talked about books of 2004. “A combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Carl von Clausewitz on war, [it is] the red-hot book among the nation’s admirals and generals,” wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Barnett’s second book, Blueprint for Action, demonstrated how to put the first book’s principles to work. Now, in Great Powers, Barnett delivers his most sweeping— and important—book of all.

In Great Powers, Barnett offers a tour de force analysis of the grand realignments that are both already here and coming up fast in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and much more. The “great powers” are no longer just the world’s major nation-states but the powerful forces, past, present, and future, moving with us and past us like a freight train. It is not a simple matter of a course correction but of a complete recalibration, and the opportunities it presents are far greater than the perils. Barnett gives us a fundamental understanding of both, showing us not only how the world is now but how it will be.

I will have more on Great Powers in the coming weeks.

Reads of the Week.

Barak Obama's Administration picks

Burned NATO trucks Pakistan

First Vietnamese-American Congressmen Joseph Cao, Louisiana

Leading off this week is this post from Zenpundit, The Elite as a Tribe about President-elect Obama's appointment.

A taste of Mark's comments.

I’m not unhappy with Obama’s appointments, finding them so far to be well qualified and I’ll offer high praise for Obama’s selection of General Jones and Secretary Gates. The Small Wars/COIN bloggers are jumping for joy and the national security bloggers, along with the conservative political bloggers, should be pleased; the next Defense Secretary or Secretary of State might easily have been Anthony Lake. It’s a more conservative national security group than any time during the Clinton administration. Count your blessings folks.

What strikes me as amusing though is the entirely visceral, euphorically emotive and almost tribal “he’s one of us” support from the elite for the President-elect. Reactions that run against the supposedly cerebral and “reality based” pretensions of empiricism and skepticism for which they make a claim but seldom practice because most of them are highly-trained, vertical thinking, experts.

No sooner had Mark commented on the selection of so many academic elites to roles in government, than he posted this, The Chicago Way is Incompatible with Gravitas.

I think most people familiar with Illinois politics expected that eventually some kind of Chicago landmine was going to go off under President-elect Barack Obama - it’s just that few people expected it might happen before the 20th of January.

www.stratfor.com files another report on the Next Steps in the Indo-Pakistani Crisis.

It begins:

In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran.

The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.

Related to a post last month, What the ----- People! part of which, was about the Taliban ambushing a supply convoy in the Kyber Pass and stealing humvees destined for NATO forces in Afghanistan. I thought that embarrassment would spur commanders to improve their supply chain security. But I was wrong.

Now, two reports of attacks on the supply chain reflect out far out of sync things have gotten in Pakistan.

Trucks Torched at Pakistan Terminal Used for NATO - Associated Press

And the ink was not even dry on the story above when this report "hits the fan."

Second Attack on NATO Trucks in Peshawar - The Times

Suspected Islamist militants in northern Pakistan set fire to 100 vehicles and other supplies for US and Nato forces in Afghanistan in the early hours of yesterday morning in the second such raid in as many days.

Witnesses and local officials said that several militants attacked a freight terminal on the outskirts of Peshawar, setting fire to several dozen containers and military vehicles.

“The militants came just past midnight, firing in the air, sprinkled petrol on containers and then set them on fire,” said Mohammad Zaman, a guard at the terminal on the Peshawar ring road. “They told us they would not harm us but they asked us not to work for the Americans,” he said.

Some local officials said that about 50 containers were destroyed, while others said the attackers set nearly 100 vehicles alight including Jeeps and 20 supply trucks.

Finally, this story from Louisiana. A state that a few decades ago has a reputation for political corruption and segregationist policies. This story mirrors the recent election of Barak Obama and Governor Bobby Jindal. The United States is a nation of immigrants who become Americans with each wave adding to our strength and innovation.

GOP Finds an Unlikely New Hero in Louisiana (By Paul Kane)

Less than 24 hours after his upset defeat of a longtime Democratic congressman from New Orleans, Anh "Joseph" Cao found the weight of the entire Republican Party resting on his diminutive shoulders.

Cao, 41, ran as a reform-minded conservative against Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), a nine-term incumbent who won reelection in 2006 despite widespread publicity about the FBI finding $90,000 in his freezer during a 2005 raid on his home. Cao, the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, plans to take a victory lap through Washington this week.

Pakistan's Army Meets Ho Chi Minh?

U.S. Army Vietnam, 1966

Search and Destroy Mission

Vietnam War Tunnel

Pakistan Army after a battle

Pakistan Army with captured arms.

In the last year of my teenage decade, I was part of the force sent by the United States to try and do what turned out to be, the impossible. The history of the Second Indochina War or Vietnam War as it is known to most Americans has been studied and debated since the first moment an American boot set foot on Vietnamese soil. That war will continue to be fodder for debate for as long as the United States exists.

An article recently in the New York Times about the efforts by the Pakistani Army to seize back a stronghold that the Taliban had carved out of their border region reminded me of tactics used forty years ago by a United States Army, superbly trained to confront their sworn enemy the USSR and the Warsaw Bloc.

We took an army that was designed to fight the "mother of all state on state wars" against the USSR. Our tactics and equipment were designed for total war and strategic thrusts and scorched earth methods to deny the enemy a foothold. The first two years of combat saw our best professional soldiers chewed up by a largely hidden enemy. By the time we adjusted our tactics the countries patience had worn thin and it became an exit strategy that governed our soul.

One of the first things discovered by American troops was the ability of the enemy to slip away unseen to what came to be know as VC tunnels. Many parts of South Vietnam were a warren of tunnels, built decades before, for earlier wars against the French and the Japanese.

A tactic known as Search and destroy became the norm, for an army indoctrinated to total war concepts. Airstrikes, carpet bombing, and massive artillery barrages were used to kill an enemy who was able to replenish themselves from cross border sanctuaries. The only lasting result of our kinetic force was to earn the enmity of the people we were tasked to help.

Only the United States Marines with their Combined Action Program (CAP) had any success winning the hearts and minds of the common people of Vietnam. And to top it off, they were deployed by General Westmoreland, to guard the DMZ as a buffer against North Vietnam, instead of being deployed to the village and rice rich Mekong Delta where their CAP program could have done some substantial good.

The article by JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH, was published in the New York Times, November 10, 2008, and illustrates how some things never change. Even the final reference to Body counts and replenishment from across the border has a familiar ring to anyone of my generation.

LOE SAM, Pakistan — When Pakistan’s army retook this strategic stronghold from the Taliban last month, it discovered how deeply Islamic militants had encroached on — and literally dug into — Pakistani territory.

Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected.

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Some tunnels stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart.

In tactics reminiscent of those used in Vietnam, The Pakistani Army is fighting the war with the army they built, not the army designed for this kind of war. Their ability to adapt is challenged by their perceived need to be prepared for state on state combat with their neighbor India.

After the Frontier Corps failed to dislodge the Taliban from Loe Sam in early August, the army sent in 2,400 troops in early September to take on a Taliban force that has drawn militants from across the tribal region, as well as a flow of fighters from Afghanistan.

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Like all Pakistani soldiers, the troops sent here had been trained and indoctrinated to fight in conventional warfare against India, considered the nation’s permanent enemy, but had barely been trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics.

Even the results of combat, mirror the American experience in Vietnam.

To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it.

The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt.

As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.

The aerial bombardment was necessary, Pakistani military officials say, to root out a well-armed Taliban force.

The Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal areas, say 83 of their soldiers have died and 300 have been wounded since early August. That compares with 61 dead among forces of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan in the first four months of 2008.

At some point, probably over a period of several years, though no official could explain exactly when, the militants dug the series of well-engineered, interconnected tunnels.

The military now believes such tunnels lace much of Bajaur, where the militants still control large swaths of territory, General Khan said in an interview at his headquarters in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.

And finally, an echo of words spoken in countless press briefings during the Vietnam War.

.....Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict.

In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan.

"You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”

The whole story: Pakistanis Mired In Brutal Battle To Oust Taliban

The challenge is for all parties involved, Pakistan, India, the United States, Russia, China and the regional powers, to work together to confront threats such as those born out of the conditions and cultures that drive disenfranchised young men into the arms of those, who instead of asking to be left along to live with their beliefs, seek to disrupt the connectivity that is empowering billions of people across the globe. Right now is the time for confronting those whom seek to make the next article a reality.

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One would hope that cooler heads in New Delhi, Islamabad, Washington and the other capitals come together to work on new strategies before the world wakes up to this news, US Should Expect Terrorist Attack by 2013 - Daily Telegraph.

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UPDATE: This post from the Small Wars Journal blog Remembering Old and New by Paul Yingling offers some insight in a look back at COIN tactics in the Vietnam War.