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The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015
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David Brooks
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In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
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Well, then, he ought to write her a letter. He ought to say: 'This is to tell you that I propose to live with you as soon as this show is over. You will be prepared immediately on cessation of active hostilities to put yourself at my disposal; please. Signed, Xtopher Tietjens, Acting O.C. 9th Glams. A proper military communication.
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Ford Madox Ford (Parade's End)
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All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.
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Peter F. Drucker (The Effective Executive)
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Great politicians, military leaders, businessmen, salesmen to be sure, and of course master PUAs all use covert communications to achieve their goals.
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Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male)
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Now, with regard to the people who have done things we call "terrorism," I'm confident they have been expressing their pain in many different ways for thirty years or more. Instead of our empathically receiving it when they expressed it in much gentler ways -- they were trying to tell us how hurt they felt that some of their most sacred needs were not being respected by the way we were trying to meet our economic and military needs -- they got progressively more agitated. Finally, they got so agitated that it took horrible form.
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Marshall B. Rosenberg (Speak Peace in a World of Conflict: What You Say Next Will Change Your World)
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Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
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To live sustainably, we must live efficiently - not misdirecting or squandering the earth's precious resources. To live efficiently, we must live peacefully for military expenditures represent an enormous diversion of resources from meeting basic human needs. To live peacefully, we must live with a reasonable degree of equity, or fairness, for it is unrealistic to think that, in a communications-rich world, a billion people will except living in absolute poverty while another billion live in conspicuous excess.
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Duane Elgin (Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich)
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Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem “If” was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader’s actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007).
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Michael J. Asken (Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers)
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How, then, can terrorists hope to achieve much? Following an act of terrorism, the enemy continues to have the same number of soldiers, tanks and ships as before. The enemy’s communication network, roads and railways are largely intact. His factories, ports and bases are hardly touched. However, the terrorists hope that even though they can barely dent the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact. Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses his massive power against them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. During every storm, many unforeseen things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stance, and the balance of power shifts.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. Churchill and Orwell showed us the way.
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Thomas E. Ricks (Churchill and Orwell)
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Military and corporate structures are hierarchical, complex, and arcane. Both science and technology employ an esoteric language familiar mainly to the initiates, while military-speak is a language unto itself. Democracy, whose culture extols the common and shared, is alien to all of these practices and their modes of communication.
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Sheldon S. Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition)
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Saint Paul was proud of his Roman citizenship, and his letter to various Christian communities in the empire presupposed an effective communications system that only Roman government, law, and military might allowed.
"The Church's administration evolved as the imperial government's structured was modified over time. An archbishop ruled a large territory that the Romans called a province. A bishop ruled a diocese, a smaller Roman administrative unit dominated by a large city.
"The capitals of the eastern and western parts of the empire -- Constantinople and Rome -- came in time to signify unusual and superior power for the bishops resident there. When the Roman state was dissolved in the Latin-speaking world around 458 A.D., the pope replaced the emperor as the political leader of the Eternal City.
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Norman F. Cantor (Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World)
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It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.
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Gilles Deleuze
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The lessons learned, then, in Robinson's case: "Additional training is required to inform soldiers of the dangers of self-medicating along with the associated risk of overdosing" is the first. "Encourage the use of a battle buddy among warriors" is the second. "Increase suicide prevention classes" is the third. "Increase communication to twice a day with high-risk soldiers" is the fourth. "Continue improvements in leader communication" is the fifth. And that's that. Eight months. Five minutes. The army moves on to the next suicide. Case forever closed.
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David Finkel (Thank You for Your Service)
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The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn’t much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare—presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians.
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Kevin D. Williamson (Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism (The Politically Incorrect Guides))
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When General Eisenhower was elected president, his predecessor, Harry Truman, said: “Poor Ike; when he was a general, he gave an order and it was carried out. Now he is going to sit in that big office and he’ll give an order and not a damn thing is going to happen.” The reason why “not a damn thing is going to happen” is, however, not that generals have more authority than presidents. It is that military organizations learned long ago that futility is the lot of most orders and organized the feedback to check on the execution of the order. They learned long ago that to go oneself and look is the only reliable feedback.5 Reports—all an American president is normally able to mobilize—are not much help. All military services have long ago learned that the officer who has given an order goes out and sees for himself whether it has been carried out. At the least he sends one of his own aides—he never relies on what he is told by the subordinate to whom the order was given. Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.
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Peter F. Drucker (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)
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Churchill created the Royal Naval Air Service, which had fifty planes by 1914, and pioneered the concept of aerial bombing of Zeppelin airship aerodromes and German lines of communication. The first successful launch of a plane off the deck of a battleship took place in January 1912, and some military historians see Churchill as the father of the modern aircraft carrier.
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Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
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Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.
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Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
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Listening to the shrill rhetoric of hard line Brexiteers - either extolling the virtues of a 'no deal' Brexit, or suggesting its inevitability is simply down to the intransigence of the EU - I am reminded of another great folly in British history: 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. It is as if we are witnessing a modern day re-enactment of that foolhardy military manoeuvre in which a mix of poor communication, rash decisions and vainglorious personalities led to the needless massacre of countless cavalrymen. Messrs. Fox, Johnson and Rees-Mogg may relish the idea of charging headlong into battle against a well prepared and strongly defended position, immune to the ensuing casualties and collateral damage. It would be appreciated if they could kindly leave the rest of us out of their futile and reckless endeavours.
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Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
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Perhaps it would not be out of place for us, her publishers, to acknowledge her. For fifty years she bullied, berated and delighted us; her insistence on the highest standards in every field of publishing was a constant challenge; her good-humour and zest for life brought warmth into our lives. That she drew great pleasure from her writing is obvious from these pages; what does not appear is the way in which she could communicate that pleasure to all those involved with her work, so that to publish her made business ceaselessly enjoyable. It is certain that both as an author and as a person Agatha Christie will remain unique. FOREWORD NIMRUD, IRAQ. 2 April 1950. Nimrud is the modern name of the ancient city of Calah, the military capital of the Assyrians. Our Expedition House is built of mud-brick. It sprawls out on the east side of the mound, and has a kitchen, a living–and dining-room, a small office, a workroom, a drawing
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Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
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The system left the Navy captain, Air Force major, or whoever happened to be on duty answering the phone in the Pentagon’s Joint War Room to choose the presidential successor. “A judgment [would] be made by the senior officer on duty in the JWR as to when he has in fact received a communication from the senior non-incapacitated member of the list,” the report explained. “The possibility exists that the man to wield Presidential authority in dire emergency might in fact be selected by a single field grade military officer.” Moreover,
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Garrett M. Graff (Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die)
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Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.
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Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
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THE WORLD HAS changed. Information is being communicated differently. Misinformation is developing its techniques. On a world scale emigration has become the principal means of survival. The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist. National states in general have been politically downsized and reduced to the role of vassals serving the new world economic order. The visionary political vocabulary of three centuries has been garbaged. In short, the economic and military global tyranny of today has been established.
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John Berger (Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance)
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For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra Del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men." Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as thought the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit." It is still possible, ofcourse, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups this becomes impossible.
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Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
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The inevitable fact is that satellite technology and space exploration are far more accessible to large institutions, military and corporate, and are hundreds of times more likely to benefit their goals than yours or mine or the Sierra Club's. These space communications technologies were invented to provide a competitive edge to the institutions that invented them, and to assist their intended exploitation of nature. People who wish to live within the confines of the planet's organic limits, and who are not committed to a constantly expanding economy, or to seeking control of resources or land, do not need satellites to map resources. The people who live near what we call "resources" already know they are there, and are happy to leave them in place.
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Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations)
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Since our civilization is irreversibly dependent on electronics, abolition of EMR is out of the question. However, as a first step toward averting disaster, we must halt the introduction of new sources of electromagnetic energy while we investigate the biohazards of those we already have with a completeness and honesty that have so far been in short supply. New sources must be allowed only after their risks have been evaluated on the basis of the knowledge acquired in such a moratorium.
With an adequately funded research program, the moratorium need last no more than five years, and the ensuing changes could almost certainly be performed without major economic trauma. It seems possible that a different power frequency—say 400 hertz instead of 60—might prove much safer. Burying power lines and providing them with grounded shields would reduce the electric fields around them, and magnetic shielding is also feasible.
A major part of the safety changes would consist of energy-efficiency reforms that would benefit the economy in the long run. These new directions would have been taken years ago but for the opposition of power companies concerned with their short-term profits, and a government unwilling to challenge them. It is possible to redesign many appliances and communications devices so they use far less energy. The entire power supply could be decentralized by feeding electricity from renewable sources (wind, flowing water, sunlight, georhermal and ocean thermal energy conversion, and so forth) into local distribution nets. This would greatly decrease hazards by reducing the voltages and amperages required. Ultimately, most EMR hazards could be eliminated by the development of efficient photoelectric converters to be used as the primary power source at each point of consumption. The changeover would even pay for itself, as the loss factors of long-distance power transmission—not to mention the astronomical costs of building and decommissioning short-lived nuclear power plants—were eliminated. Safety need not imply giving up our beneficial machines.
Obviously, given the present technomilitary control of society in most parts of the world, such sane efficiency will be immensely difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, we must try. Electromagnetic energy presents us with the same imperative as nuclear energy: Our survival depends on the ability of upright scientists and other people of goodwill to break the military-industrial death grip on our policy-making institutions.
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Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
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The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve.
The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries.
Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks.
*FCC - Federal Communications Commission
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Klaus H. Krippendorff (Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology)
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The qualities of a successful military strategist will change from person to person, but there are a central few that all of them need. These include, above all else, strategic judgment, but also stamina, interpersonal skills and a feel for people; an ability to energize, inspire and motivate; the ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; a degree of personal presence and charisma; a sincere love of servicemen and women; an ability to be tough when needed, but also compassionate when that is appropriate; fortitude in the face of adversity and the capacity to stay calm in the midst of chaos; an ability to deal with setbacks, missteps and mistakes; a sense of what leadership style is required to bring out the best in those immediately below, and also for the organization collectively. A great strategic leader also needs to be able to foresee how a conflict will end.
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David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
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The very idea of a national plan, which would be devised at the capital and would then reorder the periphery after its own image into quasi-military units obeying a single command, was profoundly centralizing. Each unit at the periphery was tied not so much to its neighboring settlement as to the command center in the capital; the lines of communication rather resembled the converging lines used to organize perspective in early Renaissance paintings. “The convention of perspective … centers everything in the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of travelling outward, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God
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James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed)
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By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.
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Jimmy Carter (Palestine Peace Not Apartheid)
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products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.
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Richard Rhodes (Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World)
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Lincoln eviscerated the U.S. Constitution. He illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; started the war without the consent of Congress; made mass arrests of tens of thousands of political dissenters (not spies) across the North without due process; declared martial law; confiscated private firearms; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers; imprisoned their editors and owners; censored all telegraph communications; nationalized the railroads; invoked military conscription, yet another form of slavery; orchestrated the secession of West Virginia from Virginia without the consent of the latter, as required by the Constitution; denied the Southern states representative government while they were under federal occupation; ordered federal troops to interfere in elections in the Northern states; deported Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham, a congressional critic from Ohio, to the Confederacy; effectively nullified the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution; and more. All of this was supposedly justified by Lincoln’s novel theory that the Constitution had to be suspended, if not destroyed, in order to save it.
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Thomas J. DiLorenzo (The Problem with Lincoln: The False Virtue of Abraham Lincoln)
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Space Rockets as Power Symbols
The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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There is safety in learning doctrine in gatherings which are sponsored by proper authority. Some members, even some who have made covenants in the temple, are associating with groups of one kind or another which have an element of secrecy about them and which pretend to have some higher source of inspiration concerning the fulfillment of prophecies than do ward or stake leaders or the General Authorities of the Church. Know this: There are counterfeit revelations which, we are warned, “if possible . . . shall deceive the very elect, who are the elect according to the covenant.” (JS—M 1:22.) . . .
For the past several years we have watched patterns of reverence and irreverence in the Church. While many are to be highly commended, we are drifting. We have reason to be deeply concerned.
The world grows increasingly noisy. Clothing and grooming and conduct are looser and sloppier and more disheveled. Raucous music, with obscene lyrics blasted through amplifiers while lights flash psychedelic colors, characterizes the drug culture. Variations of these things are gaining wide acceptance and influence over our youth. . . .
This trend to more noise, more excitement, more contention, less restraint, less dignity, less formality is not coincidental nor innocent nor harmless.
The first order issued by a commander mounting a military invasion is the jamming of the channels of communication of those he intends to conquer.
Irreverence suits the purposes of the adversary by obstructing the delicate channels of revelation in both mind and spirit.
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Boyd K. Packer
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In a 2013 speech, President Barack Obama laid out three rules for deciding whether to launch a drone strike against a specific target. The starting point was the national security, geopolitical, and civilian-safety objectives the president hoped to achieve. Three simple rules translated these broad goals into more concrete guidelines: Does the target pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people? Are there no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat? Is there near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured? Only if the answer to all three of these questions was yes would a drone strike be authorized. The American drone program is shrouded in secrecy, and it is unclear exactly how these simple rules have been used within the chain of decision making. By virtue of their simplicity and directness, however, they could provide a useful framework to structure discussions about these very tough decisions. And there is some evidence that they are working. In 2013, the year Obama articulated these simple rules, there was a sharp decline in confirmed civilian casualties by drone strikes. The concreteness of these rules also makes communicating them, both to U.S. citizens and the international community, straightforward. The United States has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on military drones, but that will not last forever. The U.K., China, Israel, and Iran had operational military drones in 2014, while other countries, including India, Pakistan, and Turkey, have advanced development programs. By articulating and adhering to a set of principles governing the use of drones, the United States has an opportunity to shape the international standards that other countries will use to guide their decisions in the future.
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Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
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ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP
"According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high."
The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018
In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it.
The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two
year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure.
While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so.
And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time.
For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz
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John Lars Zwerenz
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It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarity between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we accept the – highly fortuitous – identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms’, and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals. Communism, like fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine ‘discussion’ within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control – ‘in the name of the people’ – of the means of communication and education, and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy. Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional constraints as irrelevant – for both were essentially revolutionary, led from above by an ‘iron discipline’. Both aimed to achieve a new kind of social order, unmediated by institutions, displaying an immediate and fraternal cohesiveness. And in pursuit of this ideal association – called a fascio by nineteenth-century Italian socialists – each movement created a form of military government, involving the total mobilization of the entire populace,3 which could no longer do even the most peaceful-seeming things except in a spirit of war, and with an officer in charge. This mobilization was put on comic display, in the great parades and festivals that the two ideologies created for their own glorification.
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Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left)
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We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states.
In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton.
Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.
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Grace Blakeley
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In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death.
When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.'
Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight.
In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.
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Lee Ellis (Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton)
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Regardless of their leaders' decisions, nation-states-their bureaucratic reach augmented by the increasingly centralized orchestration of tax revenues, industrial and communications technologies, military power, and police forces-controlled the churches and all expressions of religion with greater effectiveness than had ever been possible during the Reformation era. During the Cold War, this was no less true of the United States than it was of the Soviet Union, despite the radically different ways in which these two nations regarded religion and treated religious believers.
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Brad S. Gregory (The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society)
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What we know today as the Internet (and the visual component of the World Wide Web) evolved from military to academic to commercial interests. In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense wanted a secure communications system that could survive disasters. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a network so that scientists at major universities could communicate and share research. In 1990, NSF announced a plan for privatization.
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Lynne Schrum (Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools)
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For the value of history, and therefore of military history, is not in the facts it communicates or even in the principals it illustrates. The value of history is that it can provide fresh insight into the past and hence a better understanding of the present.
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Jay Luvaas (New dimensions in military history: An anthology)
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Undecidability and derailments of communication are always and already at work, in all discourse – in law, politics, education, the military, medicine, etc, as well as in philosophy and theory.
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Jeff Collins (Introducing Derrida: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0))
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His features were Middle Eastern, his eyes haunted but also defiant. They were all defiant, Gray had found. When he looked at someone like al-Omari, Gray couldn’t help but think of a Dostoyevsky creation, the displaced outsider, brooding, plotting and methodically stroking a weapon of anarchy. It was the face of a fanatic, of one possessed by a deranged evil. It was the same type of person who’d taken away forever the two people Gray had loved most in the world. Though al-Omari was thousands of miles away in a facility only a very few people even knew existed, the picture and sound were crystal clear thanks to the satellite downlink. Through his headset he asked al-Omari a question in English. The man promptly answered in Arabic and then smiled triumphantly. In flawless Arabic Gray said, “Mr. al-Omari, I am fluent in Arabic and can actually speak it better than you. I know that you lived in England for years and that you speak English better than you do Arabic. I strongly suggest that we communicate in that language so there is absolutely no misunderstanding between us.” Al-Omari’s smile faded, and he sat straighter in his chair. Gray explained his proposal. Al-Omari was to become a spy for the United States, infiltrating one of the deadliest terrorist organizations operating in the Middle East. The man promptly refused. Gray persisted and al-Omari refused yet again, adding that “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “There are currently ninety-three terrorist organizations in the world as recognized by the U.S. State Department, most of them originating in the Middle East,” Gray responded. “You have confirmed membership in at least three of them. In addition, you were found with forged passports, structural plans to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and bomb-making material. Now you’re going to work for us, or it will become distinctly unpleasant.” Al-Omari smiled and leaned toward the camera. “I was interrogated years ago in Jordan by your CIA and your military and your FBI, your so-called Tiger Teams. They sent females in wearing only their underwear. They wiped their menstrual blood on me, or at least what they called their menstrual blood, so I was unclean and could not perform my prayers. They rubbed their bodies against me, offered me sex if I talk. I say no to them and I am beaten afterward.” He sat back. “I have been threatened with rape, and they say I will get AIDS from it and die. I do not care. True followers of Muhammad do not fear death as you Christians do. It is your greatest weakness and will lead to your total destruction. Islam will triumph. It is written in the Qur’an. Islam will rule the world.
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David Baldacci (The Camel Club (Camel Club, #1))
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There was talk, high-level talk, at Wake Island, Sunday, 15 October, but there was not enough communication.
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T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
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Serious gap of communication between the IB and the State Police on the one hand and the IB and the R&AW and the CBI on the other, had become apparent during security operations in Punjab, Kashmir, Assam and against the Pakistan sponsored Jihadist elements. The most glaring example of total intelligence failure was the Kargil adventure by Pakistan army. The R&AW, the Military Intelligence and to a lesser extent the Intelligence Bureau had miserably failed to unearth the Pakistani design and warn the policy planners. Whatever intelligence was available was not coordinated to cull out a coherent collage. The rest is history.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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Moltke expanded on these ideas and fully explained the intent of mission orders in the second section “Communications between Commands and Units.” The Chief of the Prussian Staff wrote that detailed orders beyond the immediate tactical situation were usually of little value. Each battle, movement, and deployment changed the situation, which required the commander to re-examine the battlefield conditions. He later suggested that this would cause higher commanders to issue too many orders, confusing their subordinates.[28]
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Michael J. Gunther (Auftragstaktik: The Basis For Modern Military Command)
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The Aztecs, impressed by the wealth and culture of some of the tribes they conquered, labored to perfect their own state. By the time of Cortés’s arrival, their achievements had equaled and in some cases surpassed all other Indian civilizations of the New World. In the realm of government, the Aztecs developed their own system of tribunals to administer justice. They had their own viceroys to rule their provinces that spread across the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific - and to communicate between their states they set up a messenger service as efficient as any in Europe. In science, they had knowledge of medicine and had begun to experiment with herbs, classifying them along with the diseases they cured. In art, their architecture was impressive, and their sculpture brilliant. And of all their accomplishments, the art of war was the one the Aztecs had developed most highly. Their aptitude for military matters and their emphasis on training and discipline impressed the Spanish conquistadors and was even respected by them.
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Irwin R. Blacker (Cortés and the Aztec Conquest)
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since military operations are usually accompanied by an increase in communications, traffic analysis can infer the imminence of such operations by watching the volume of traffic. When combined with direction-finding, it can often approximate the where and when of a planned movement.
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David Kahn (The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet)
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The world owes its first instructional text on communications security to the Greeks. It appeared as an entire chapter in one of the earliest works on military science, On the Defense of Fortified Places, by Aeneas the Tactician.
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David Kahn (The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet)
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. Unable to find a master list of what military assets they could use, NORAD personnel opened phone lists and began to call Air Force and Air National Guard bases across the United States one by one, asking if they had any planes they could get airborne. “There were Guard units I’d never heard of calling asking how they could help. And we said, ‘Yes, take off,’ ” recalls one NEADS technician. By the day’s end, nearly 400 fighters, tankers, and airborne command posts would be keeping watch from the sky, flying out of sixty-nine different sites around the country. Not even the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis had seen such a huge, rapid military buildup. VII. Even inside the agency, communication
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Garrett M. Graff (Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die)
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mass communications in free societies, is an indispensable element of terrorism. Closed societies, with control of mass communications, are not good targets.
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J.C. Wylie (Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Classics of Sea Power))
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British data analytics company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare. The American affiliate of SCL, of which Robert Mercer became principal owner, was christened Cambridge Analytica. (Bannon, too, took an ownership stake and a seat on the company’s board.) The
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Joshua Green (Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency)
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Foolish is the leader whom in the midst of organizational chaos believes since no one is approaching them with issues or concerns then everything must be doing fine. When your Soldiers cease communicating with you are 3ft into a 6ft hole.
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Donavan Nelson Butler
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The incomplete vocabulary of strategy as an intellectual discipline limits the communication of the central concept of indirectness. This concept, as it now stands, is formless.
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J.C. Wylie (Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Classics of Sea Power))
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The docile doves have
been mocked enough,
by the darting drones
that are built to snuff;
and the olive branches
have been dripping red,
ever since we put our faith,
in capsules of lead.
At a time, when we
need open libraries,
the governments are
plotting robotic militaries.
and for how long should
our nations linger in fear,
from the day-to-day threats
of dropping nuclear.
Every time we wear our
remembrance poppies,
remember, that our heroes
died hoping for peace;
and lest we rise above
the hemlocks of war,
the flowers of mercy, will
remain covered in gore.
Violence has a domino effect,
only triggers more hate,
won't stop unless we make
an effort to communicate;
and since the future is
indeed today's derivative,
it's high time that we changed,
this dystopian narrative.
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Akash Mandal
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In 2001, Dr. D.A. Graham received the Chaplain of the Year award from the Military Chaplain Association for the United States Marine Corps. He is a certified facilitator for Development Dimensions International as well as a certified facilitator in nonviolent communications. Dr. Graham served as Founding President of the Alabama Student Society of Communication Arts. He is the proud parent of his daughter, Diedre, who graduated from the University of Alabama.
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D.A. Graham
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The objective is to map the interior of the Territory and document information regarding the native tribes in order to be prepared for any future serious disturbances between the United States government and the natives of the Territory. The reconnaissance will also attempt to ascertain whether and how a military force would be sustained in this region if necessary, including information about climate, severity of winter, and means of communication and types of weapons in possession of the natives. Information should be gathered and documented thoroughly along the reconnaissance in the event that the expedition must be abandoned.
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Eowyn Ivey (To the Bright Edge of the World)
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Don't hear songs and don't use fb, WhatsApp, insta, instead asked me to use letters- This crazy girl told me. But I guess it might good idea as well once I go there. Will be single that cleanse society through science. Contact me through letters once I go there. It is kind of military thing but it is indeed good idea and better communication
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Ganapathy K
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The White House Situation Room is not just a room. It is a complex of multiple spaces manned 24/7 by rotating teams of duty officers and communications specialists. Team members are on loan from intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the military services.
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Michael K. Bohn (Presidents in Crisis: Tough Decisions inside the White House from Truman to Obama)
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On October 24, H.E. President Maharaja Hari Singh ji appealed to India for military aid to flush out the raiders. India obliged but not before the Instrument of Accession was signed on October 26. It limited India’s powers over the Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh to matters of defence, communications, and foreign affairs.
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Maharaja Hari Singh-Accession
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He was now the CEO of Distance Communications, a hi-tech manufacturer of the electronic components for various weapons systems, part of that immense gray world of military contracting where billions were made and little was publicly known.
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Scott Turow (Testimony (Kindle County, #10))
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Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential:
1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble.
2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment.
3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.
4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals.
5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.
6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.
7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns.
8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
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Our military is very powerful, very lethal,” says Captain Ryan La Rance, an officer who manages the airmen on a Doomsday Plane, “but it doesn’t happen without communication.
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Annie Jacobsen (Nuclear War: A Scenario)
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Templar tactical gear that included dark ceramic body armor worn under black jumpsuits of flame retardant material without markings or insignia, lightweight Kevlar tactical helmets with built–in communications gear along with audio and video recording devices, and military style combat boots. For this mission a set of I2 goggles had also been supplied; the image intensifier headgear – what most people called night vision goggles – would allow them to see in all but total darkness. Each man was armed with a Heckler & Koch MP5 SD submachine gun, a HK Mark 23 .45 caliber handgun and the holy sword they’d been given at their investiture into the Templar ranks.
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Joseph Nassise (Judgement Day (Templar Chronicles #5))
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This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called “Communism.” It will be interesting to see what “enemy” develops in the years ahead. It appears that “UFO’s and Aliens” are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.
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L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
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I have Executive Orders here, which are part of Order 21, that will disband Congress and the Supreme Court, have all three branches consolidated into the Executive, orders for TSA to initiate the plan they’re ready to execute, and all communications to be monitored by the NSA at all times and shut down when necessary. The DOJ will step up the internment of Christians, Jews, and all people who oppose your rule. Other orders include Martial Law and enabling the United Nations to establish a military presence in our larger cities. All you have to do is sign these and I will get my people to work on implementing everything by the time you announce the elections nullified,” “Do you think some of my people should start causing riots so we can fully justify Martial Law?” “Oh, I’ve already ordered that. I’ve got everything covered, don’t you worry about it,” answered Evans in a dismissive tone.
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Cliff Ball (Times of Trial: Christian End Times Thriller (The End Times Saga Book 3))
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The Allies of Humanity Briefings are a genuine communication from a group claiming to represent the “free races” in our local region of space. The Allies distinguish themselves from those races who are intervening in the world today. They warn us against the presence of this Intervention, insisting that no foreign race should be visiting our world, either now or in the future, until humanity has gained the strength, unity and maturity necessary to engage successfully with a Greater Community of intelligent life in the universe. Whether humanity can ever attain this is uncertain, yet the Allies tell us that intervention in our world has already begun by several non-military races seeking to establish their influence and dominance in our world through deceptive and persuasive means.
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Marshall Vian Summers (The Allies of Humanity: Book Three)
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Most East Asians speak and dream in the language of the Han Empire. No matter what their origins, nearly all the inhabitants of the two American continents, from Alaska’s Barrow Peninsula to the Straits of Magellan, communicate in one of four imperial languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule. About 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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This difficulty in identifying and expressing feelings is common, and in my experience, especially so among lawyers, engineers, police officers, corporate managers, and career military personnel—people whose professional codes discourage them from manifesting emotions.
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Marshall B. Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life)
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This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the canopy of an ever-present “enemy” called “Communism.” And then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.
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L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
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In fact, a dolphin's whistles, pulses, and clicks, made by air sacs just below its blowhole, are among the loudest noised made by marine animals. A scientist at Penn State's Center for Information and Communications Technology Research has been analyzing these underwater messages not for meaning but for hints on how to make our wireless signals more effective. As the Ask Nature database describes, Dr. Mohsen Kavehrad uses "multirate, ultrashort laser pulses, or wavelets, that mimic dolphin chirps, to make optical wireless signals that can better penetrate fog, clouds, and other adverse weather conditions." The multiburst quality of dolphin sounds "increases the chances that a signal will get past obstacles" in the surrounding water. In the same way, Dr. Kavehrad's simulated dolphin chirps increase the odds of getting around such tiny obstacles as droplets of fog or rain. This strategy could expand the capability of optical bandwidth to carry even greater amounts of information. Such an application technology could optimize communication between aircraft and military vehicles, hospital wards, school campus buildings, emergency response teams, and citywide networks.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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the Victorian revolution in global communications achieved ‘the annihilation of distance’. But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain’s principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.
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Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World)
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The importance of the bureaucratic link and the source of power-the divine king-and the actual human machines that performed the works of construction or destruction can hardly be exaggerated: all the more because it was the bureaucracy that collected the annual taxes and tributes that supported the new social pyramid and forcibly assembled the manpower that formed the new mechanical fabric. The bureaucracy was, in fact, the third type of 'invisible machine'-one might call it a communications-machine-co-existing with the military and labor machines, and an integral part of the final totalitarian structure.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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Pharmaceutical and health companies, communications through all media (TV, newspapers, internet, telephones), energy where Tenth Cycle technology hadn’t yet arrived, transport including airlines, shipping, rail and road transport, along with military contractors, big agro and big pharma, and technology companies; all were controlled by a handful of companies whose names showed up over and over. They were always in a minority shareholder position individually, but as a group the controlling interest was overwhelming.
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J.C. Ryan (The Skywalkers (Rossler Foundation, #5))
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If progressive deep frames had been articulated and present in the public mind, the idea of a “war on terror” never would have made sense. If we viewed our strength as our diplomatic ability to forge international consensus and coalitions, and if we recognized that killing and maiming civilians through military action creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terrorism, we wouldn’t have looked to our military to solve the problem. Had progressive deep frames been prevalent at the time of 9/11, Americans would have taken “war on terror” as a powerful metaphor but not a literal guide to action, like the “war on poverty.” They would have seen it as a major crime problem—like international organized crime—and sought to bring these criminals to justice by the means that work best, like tracing bank accounts, placing spies in their organizations, and so on. It
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George Lakoff (Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision)
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However, it also seems that he envisioned this system of command to take over when communications between headquarters failed.[103] Despite this nod to idea of Auftragstaktik, the rest of manual does little to suggest that DePuy actually believed in these concepts. The manual focused primarily on the technical aspects of weapons systems, not soldiers’ and commanders’ management of those weapons systems. The manual’s content suggested that the commander who masters the employment of tanks, infantry, and artillery pieces better than his opponent would win the battle. In the defense, brigade commanders should expect to move company-teams from individual battle positions to maximize lethality.[104]
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Michael J. Gunther (Auftragstaktik: The Basis For Modern Military Command)
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Conservatives have long advanced the idea that our military can—and should—be used to shape foreign policy; our strength is the size and capacity of our military. They have advanced a retributive crime policy—punish the wrongdoers, no need to look at systemic causes of crime. The “war on terror” activates these deep frames, and politicians, the media, and the public continue to use the phrase because the conservative deep frames have become so pervasive. If
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George Lakoff (Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision)
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CHAPTER II SPACE MISSION AREAS “Weather, intelligence, communications, precision [sic]-navigation-and timing... are all capabilities we have brought to the fight from the space domain and are relied upon in virtually any and every military operation. ” Mr. Michael B. Donley Secretary of the Air Force November 2010 1. Introduction US military space operations are composed of the following mission areas: space situational awareness, space force enhancement, space support, space control, and space force application. This chapter summarizes the role of each mission area and how they
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Anonymous
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Bar Sauma strengthened diplomatic and political channels in his attempts to build an East-West military alliance, and his efforts reopened the lines of communication throughout the post-Roman world at a time when the Crusades had compromised the resources of the Europe’s leading monarchies. His efforts also opened up new communication and trade channels between European and Middle East/Asian states.
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Michael Rank (Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World)
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During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed.
Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes.
The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see.
To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.
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Robert H. Scales
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The outsiders, with their own objectives, provided rifles, ammunition, communications equipment, military vehicles and combat advice to young men who lacked the discipline and patience for a long-term, non-violent and democratic struggle.
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Charles Glass (The State of Syria)
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A profession that I was once proud to serve in has become a militarized police state. Officers are quicker to draw their guns and use their tanks than to communicate with people to defuse a situation. They love to use their toys, and when they do, people die. The days of the peace officer are long gone, replaced by the militarized police warrior wearing uniforms making them indistinguishable from military personnel.
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Jim Marrs (Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us)
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It illustrates the force that military conquest has played in furthering the connections among disparate societies. It shows how commerce follows conquest, how commerce and culture intersect, and how transport and communications networks become so important.
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Jeffrey E. Garten (From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives)
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the Internet! You knew the Mad Scientists invented the World Wide Web, right? Yep, back in the 1970s, the “Net” was a project designed to help with military communication. And here’s the beauty of DARPA’s mad scientists: they share their inventions whenever they can. Whenever DARPA comes up with an invention that will help society, they give it away. So, we ALL get to use the Internet. Thanks, DARPA!
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Bart King (The Big Book of Spy Stuff)
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age COG—except for one minor problem. There was no clear communication system that would ensure the nation’s leaders didn’t end up living through a nuclear attack, only to be stuck 3,500 feet below in the world’s best-engineered tomb, cut off from the world above as supplies dwindled. That flaw made it unlikely a president would ever utilize the DUCC. Joint Chiefs chairman Maxwell Taylor wrote, “Escape and survivable communications from a DUCC would be problematical in case of a direct attack on Washington with large-yield nuclear weapons.” In the end, the DUCC never made it far off the drawing board. While the initial appropriation to begin digging was included in the FY1965 military budget, the House Armed Services Committee didn’t approve the full funding. Even as the Pentagon began to study specific sites, the project died a slow death—a casualty of its own shortcomings, of shifting national priorities, and a military budget increasingly focused on ground troops, Huey helicopters, and the other costs of the Vietnam War. In
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Garrett M. Graff (Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die)
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In a 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favors the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right. Even though the Democrats controlled Washington at that time, Marcuse associated the right with the business community, the military, and other vested interests that he saw as wielding power, hoarding wealth, and working to block social change.52 The left referred to students, intellectuals, and minorities of all kinds. For Marcuse, there was no moral equivalence between the two sides. In his view, the right pushed for war; the left stood for peace; the right was the party of “hate,” the left the party of “humanity.”53
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
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The best plan in the world will fail if you cannot communicate it. Similarly, a
poor plan can be saved by good confident orders. Only competent orders will
leave a Marine in no doubt as to what is expected of him.
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Sergeant Walker, Robin Blair-Crawford, Soutlands Snuffyss
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The best plan in the world will fail if you cannot communicate it. Similarly, a
poor plan can be saved by good confident orders. Only competent orders will
leave a Marine in no doubt as to what is expected of him
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Sergeant Walker (Southlands Snuffys)
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The world grows increasingly noisy,” President Boyd K. Packer observed. “Raucous music, with obscene lyrics blasted through amplifiers while lights flash psychedelic colors, characterizes the drug culture. Variations of these things are gaining wide acceptance and influence over our youth. . . . This trend to more noise, more excitement, more contention, less restraint, less dignity, less formality is not coincidental nor innocent nor harmless. The first order issued by a commander mounting a military invasion is the jamming of the channels of communication of those he intends to conquer. . . . No one of us can survive in the world of today, much less in what it soon will become, without personal inspiration.
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Robert L. Millet (The Holy Spirit: His Identity, Mission, and Ministry)
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but not in the way it is intended to be.3 For an example of a chain of unintended uses, let us start with Phase One, the computer. The mathematical discipline of combinatorics, here basic science, derived from propositional knowledge, led to the building of computers, or so the story goes. (And, of course, to remind the reader of cherry-picking, we need to take into account the body of theoretical knowledge that went nowhere.) But at first, nobody had an idea what to do with these enormous boxes full of circuits as they were cumbersome, expensive, and their applications were not too widespread, outside of database management, only good to process quantities of data. It is as if one needed to invent an application for the thrill of technology. Baby boomers will remember those mysterious punch cards. Then someone introduced the console to input with the aid of a screen monitor, using a keyboard. This led, of course, to word processing, and the computer took off because of its fitness to word processing, particularly with the microcomputer in the early 1980s. It was convenient, but not much more than that until some other unintended consequence came to be mixed into it. Now Phase Two, the Internet. It had been set up as a resilient military communication network device, developed by a research unit of the Department of Defense called DARPA and got a boost in the days when Ronald Reagan was obsessed with the Soviets. It was meant to allow the United States to survive a generalized military attack. Great idea, but add the personal computer plus Internet and we get social networks, broken marriages, a rise in nerdiness, the ability for a post-Soviet person with social difficulties to find a matching spouse. All that thanks to initial U.S. tax dollars (or rather budget deficit) during Reagan’s anti-Soviet crusade.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (Incerto, #4))
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Just as centralized military communication systems were vulnerable to nuclear attacks (and thus the Internet was developed to maintain communication even if there was a nuclear hit), an outdated “mainframe” model of health care delivery left many countries more vulnerable. Centering on hospitals, rather than care at home, public health and primary care was a key contributor to outbreaks worsening.
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Dave Chase (Relocalizing Health: The Future of Health Care is Local, Open and Independent)
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The various branches of the US military have special operations forces. These are made up of units of soldiers who have been specially trained to tackle the most risky and dangerous military operations in the world—most of which are never heard about by the general public. Special-ops forces such as the Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine RECONs, and Air Force Special Tactics are comprised of the most elite soldiers in the world. Their training is beyond rigorous, and the qualifications to join such exclusive groups of warriors are extremely high. These elite soldiers make up a small percentage of the total military, but they are the tip of the spear when it comes to critical combat operations. These units usually operate in small numbers, drop behind enemy lines, practice tactics repetitively before executing a given operation, and train for every combat condition they might encounter. But even with an exceptional level of training and expertise, there is one critical component that is absolutely necessary for them to successfully reach their objective: communication. These elite special-ops fighters are part of a larger overarching entity with which they must stay in communication—SOCOM. This acronym stands for Special Operations Command.1 Key to their success from the elite soldier on the field all the way to the commander-in-chief is communication through SOCOM. A unit or soldier on mission in the theater of battle can have the latest weapons and technology, but they cannot access the fuller power and might of the military without the critical link—communications. If a satellite phone goes down or can’t access a signal, this life-or-death communication is broken. Without the ability to call in for air support when being overrun, medical evacuation when someone is injured, or passing on key intelligence information to SOCOM, an operation can be compromised. When communication is absent, things can go south in a hurry. In the realm of special military operations, communication is life.
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Todd Hampson (The Non-Prophet's Guide™ to Spiritual Warfare (Non-Prophet's Guide(tm)))
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In technical terms, his scheme can be described as follows: Take two copies of a chaotic system. Treat one as the driver; in applications to communications, it will function as the transmitter. The other system receives signals from the driver, but does not send any back. The communication is one-way. (Think of a military command center sending encrypted orders to its soldiers in the field or to sailors at sea.) To synchronize the systems, send the ever-changing numerical value of one of the driver variables to the receiver, and use it to replace the corresponding receiver variable, moment by moment. Under certain circumstances, Pecora found that all the other receiver variables—the ones not replaced—would automatically snap into sync with their counterparts in the driver. Having done so, all the variables are now matched. The two systems are completely synchronized.
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Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
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The list of secrets that, if passed to a foreign power, could bring the death penalty for espionage includes data about nuclear weapons, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, war plans, codes or communications intelligence, major weapons systems, or any “major element of defense strategy.” 30 The Mind of Robert Hanssen Robert Philip Hanssen was a walking paradox—a zealous
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David Wise (Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America)
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During World War II, radio communications took a great leap. Bell Labs, at the military’s behest, had worked on compact and sophisticated communications systems for tanks and airplanes. Meanwhile, Motorola, a small company out of Chicago, built a rugged “handie-talkie” for soldiers.
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Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
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As Elsa Kania put it, ‘Huawei’s global expansion, in and of itself, can serve as a vector for Beijing’s influence.’137 After all, if Huawei achieves its goal of becoming the dominant supplier and builder of the global communication network of the twenty-first century, that gives Beijing enormous influence around the world. Huawei is at the fulcrum of President Xi’s two fusions, the Party–corporate fusion and the civilian–military fusion, to which might be added a third, the influence–espionage fusion.
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Clive Hamilton (Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World)
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When Hari Seldon established the Foundation here, it was for the ostensible purpose of producing a great Encyclopedia, and for fifty years we followed that will-of-the-wisp, before discovering what he was really after. By that time, it was almost too late. When communications with the central regions of the old Empire broke down, we found ourselves a world of scientists concentrated in a single city, possessing no industries and surrounded by newly created kingdoms, hostile and largely barbarous. We were a tiny island of atomic power in this ocean of barbarism, and an infinitely valuable prize. ‘Anacreon, then as now, the most powerful of the Four Kingdoms, demanded and actually established a military base upon Terminus, and the then rulers of the City, the Encyclopedists, knew very well that this was only a preliminary to taking over the entire planet. That is how matters stood when I … uh … assumed actual government. What would you have done?
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Isaac Asimov (Foundation)