Via TED - This demo by Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry, was the buzz of TED. Sixth Sense is a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.
The US government must fundamentally redefine the struggle against terrorism, replacing the "war on terror" with a campaign combining all facets of national power to defeat the enemy, John O. Brennan, President Obama's senior counterterrorism adviser, said Wednesday.
Previewing what aides said will be the administration's most comprehensive statement to date on its long-term strategy to defeat al-Qaeda and other violent extremists worldwide, Brennan said in an interview that the United States will maintain "unrelenting" pressure on terrorist havens, including those near the Afghan-Pakistani border, in Yemen and in Somalia.
However, Washington must couple the military strikes that have depleted al-Qaeda's middle ranks with more sustained use of economic, diplomatic and cultural levers to diminish Islamist radicalization, he said, exercising "soft power" in ways that President George W. Bush came to embrace but had trouble carrying out.
"It needs to be much more than a kinetic effort, an intelligence, law enforcement effort. It has to be much more comprehensive," said Brennan, who will address the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday. "This is not a 'war on terror.' ... We cannot let the terror prism guide how we're going to interact and be involved in different parts of the world."
More at The Washington Post.
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5, 2009 -- If more resources are required after the commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan completes his assessment of the situation there, a separate process would follow, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said today.
The Afghanistan review and reports about Russian submarines patrolling off the East Coast of the United States were among topics Morrell discussed at a news conference.
Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's assessment will not contain any requests for resources, Morrell said.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed McChrystal to conduct an operations assessment to ascertain what is needed to implement President Barack Obama's new policy for Afghanistan. Gates likely will receive the report late this month or in early September, Morrell said.
The Afghanistan assessment will focus on the situation on the ground and the way ahead, Morrell said. But, he added, "it will not offer specific resource requests or recommendations."
If the review determines that additional resources are required to complete the Afghanistan mission, requests would then go through the normal chain-of-command process, Morrell said, to be validated and forwarded to Gates. Gates then would decide whether to recommend to the president that he commit additional resources for the Afghanistan mission.
Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Belgium over the weekend to meet with senior U.S. commanders and NATO officials to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. The secretary was impressed after viewing a briefing detailing the progress of the Afghanistan review thus far, Morrell said.
Turning to other news, Morrell said the U.S. military was not worried about news reports that Russian submarines were traveling in international waters a few hundred miles off the U.S. eastern seaboard. The U.S. military was aware of the approach and presence of the Russian underwater vessels, he said.
"So long as they're operating in international waters -- as, frankly, we do around the world -- and are behaving in a responsible way, they are certainly free to do so," Morrell said, "and it doesn't cause any alarm in this building."
Related AFPS Articles:
Mullen Calls for Progress in Afghanistan
... What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan's importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Tune in to the Sunday talk shows or consult the op-ed pages and you might conclude otherwise. Those who profess to be in the know insist that the fight in Afghanistan is essential to keeping America safe. The events of September 11, 2001, ostensibly occurred because we ignored Afghanistan. Preventing the recurrence of those events, therefore, requires that we fix the place...
Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it's also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Of course, Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how Brits, Russians, or other foreigners have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until just recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, "There's always an inclination to relate what we're doing with previous nations," adding, "I think that's a very unhealthy comparison." McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We're Americans. We're different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.
Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be —to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a "success" and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around...
For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say, Mexico? In terms of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor—a major supplier of oil and drugs among other commodities deemed vital to the American way of life—outranks Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude...
Much more at Commonweal.
By John J. Kruzel
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2009 -- A Defense Department review is weighing the benefits of social networking and other Web 2.0 platforms against potential security vulnerabilities they create.
In a memo issued last week, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III directed a study of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in hopes of establishing a policy by October, Pentagon Spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters today.
"We're addressing the challenges from a security standpoint, but also the impact and the value that they have to the department to be able to communicate in a 21st century environment," Whitman said.
Per his deputy's memo, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is slated to receive a report on the threats and benefits of Web 2.0 tools before the end of the month. Both Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have embraced the new technologies.
The Pentagon's chief information officer is taking the lead on the review, which was catalyzed by concerns raised at U.S. Strategic Command, Whitman said. Stratcom is responsible for overseeing the use of the "dot-mil" network.
In the meantime, there are no department-wide orders banning the use of social networking and other Web 2.0 applications, Whitman said, adding that standard local restrictions to such sites may occur due to bandwidth or security concerns.
"But as a department, we recognize the importance of taking a look at this issue because there are legitimate security concerns," he said.
In an interview with a blog site yesterday, Price Floyd, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, emphasized the importance of maintaining operational security, or Opsec, in an era of Web-based social networking.
"Opsec is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that," Floyd told Wired's "Danger Room." "The [Defense Department] is, in that sense, no different than any big company in America. What we can't do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business. ... Companies in the private sector that have policies like us don't dare shut down their Web sites. They have to sell their products and ideas -- and this is how it's done.
"Opsec needs to catch up with this stuff. This is the modern equivalent of sending a letter home from the front lines," he added. "Opsec needs to be considered on this stuff, but the more our troops do this stuff, the better off we are."
More:
What's on the Pentagon's Mind? Facebook - Los Angeles Times
Marines Ban Facebook and MySpace, Pentagon Considers It - Wall Street Journal
Pentagon Studying Social-networking Sites - United Press International
Military is Anything but Uniform - Stars and Stripes
Southcom Embraces Two-Way Impact of Social Media - AFPS
Pentagon Social Media Czar Pushes Web 2.0, Despite Ban Threat - Danger Room
Pentagon Wrestles with Possible Twitter, Facebook Ban (Updated) - Danger Room
Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook - Danger Room
CNN's Barbara Starr reported last week that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is expected to ask the Obama administration for additional troops and equipment for conducting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as more military resources to deal with roadside bombs and explosives.
This impending request appears to conflict with a report earlier in July by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward who wrote that on a trip to Afghanistan, James L. Jones, national security adviser, personally told US military commanders in the country that the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels flat for now.
But given the relatively small size of the Afghan army and police - numbering some 170,000 men - and with the total number of US/NATO troops numbering around 100,000, McChrystal's impending request makes a great deal of military sense. While the combined forces total 270,000, classic counterinsurgency doctrine indicates that Afghanistan needs as many as 600,000 soldiers and cops to protect its population of some 30 million.
An additional reason why more boots on the ground makes military sense is the large geographic scope of the Taliban insurgency. Estimates of the number of full-time fighters generally do not go above 20,000 men. But according to our analysis of an unpublished threat assessment map provided by the Afghan National Security Forces to the United Nations in April, 40 percent of Afghanistan was either under direct Taliban control or a high-risk area for insurgent attacks...
Much more at CNN.
This decade the U.S. military, led by its mid-ranking and junior leaders, has adapted to the demands of irregular warfare. It has thus renewed centuries of American tradition. Now American statesmen must show similar powers of adaptation.
Why has the United States had so much trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan? When U.S. statesmen look at a map, they see national borders and think about their political counterparts in other nation-states. When today's American soldiers look at a map, they see an abstract watercolor of tribal territories, which often run over political boundaries long ignored by the tribal combatants.
After years of trial and error, U.S. soldiers in the field now know how to cooperate on common goals with tribes and local leaders—the pacification of Iraq's Anbar Province through the tribal Awakening movement is the most notable recent example of this. But the United States has encountered hostility when it has attempted to enforce a top-down nation-state model on un—tribes and local leaders—the growing insurgency in Afghanistan is evidence of this. In fact, traditional resistance to central national authority is what has caused the chaotic regions the United States has found itself in to be chaotic in the first place.
Top-level U.S. statesmen are loath to give up on the nation-state system, which is the foundation for so much of international law and diplomacy, and the basis by which U.S. statesmen do their work. Yet American soldiers have learned from hard experience how to succeed in the parts of the world that continue to function on a tribal basis. U.S. statesmen need to catch up in their thinking to where U.S. soldiers already are. Once they do, the United States will have an easier time achieving its national security objectives...
Much more at The American. Robert Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal, writes SWJ's weekly column at Foreign Policy, and is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer.
