Opposed Systems Design

It’s a big expansion for SW. Having flown both airlines a fair amount, I think there will be some integration pain. AirTran does the nickle-and-dime routine - charging to pick a seat, get on early (to claim precious overhead bin space), check bags - while Southwest has aggressively avoided those sorts of fees. Still, getting to fly Southwest to Atlanta would be nice.

It’s a big expansion for SW. Having flown both airlines a fair amount, I think there will be some integration pain. AirTran does the nickle-and-dime routine - charging to pick a seat, get on early (to claim precious overhead bin space), check bags - while Southwest has aggressively avoided those sorts of fees. Still, getting to fly Southwest to Atlanta would be nice.

There are some interesting metaphors one could draw, such as having an officer watching over several UAVs at once while enlisted personnel do the actual flying of the UAVs (sort of like the captain of a sub giving orders and enlisted personnel doing the actual moment-to-moment controlling of the boat). A problem comes in, however, with the myopic perspective on cost. Personnel do represent a significant portion of the defense budget (albeit a portion often overlooked by the media and casual discourse) . UAVs cost about the same as manned aircraft on a per-pound basis - the reason MQ-1s and -9s are so much cheaper than F-22s is because they are less capable (fly slower, no low observability, no AESA, …). If we want more of our force structure to be UAVs, then we’ll see the requirements for these platforms increase and they’ll become more expensive. Also, UAVs crash more often than their manned counterparts - the rate is decreasing, but they are earlier on their learning curve. This means that in order to maintain the same number of operational aircraft over a 30-year time horizon, one needs more UAVs than manned aircraft (to replace expected losses). Not that this negates the personnel cost savings a priori but it certainly complicates the analysis. (Another factor is how quickly semi-autonomous UAVs enter the force, because it is possible the single-operator/single-platform model could change before the USAF changes it personnel policies, leading to a world where one USAF officer controls a swarm of UAVs.)
Another issue regards constituencies within a service. Pilots - in particular fighter pilots - are a major constituency within the USAF. If there are fewer UAV billets for officers, then that leads to fewer general officers down the line who came from a UAV background. Such service constituencies are not the only way military innovations are adopted, but they do have a significant influence on the speed and breadth of adaptation to a new force structure.
[H/T ID]

Lynn noted that JFCOM had 2,100 people and a $300 million budget in 2000, its first year of operation. By 2010, he said, it had about 6,000 employees and a $1 billion budget – “without any significant expansion of mission or responsibility.”

From Parkinson’s classic essay:

The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear.

[pdf]

What I find odd is that two of my more substantive corrections to FM over the years apparently don’t make the cut. So I’ll offer them here:
Using sports as a metaphor for war is a dangerous exercise that will likely confuse you. Perhaps the American military didn’t do a good enough job learning from the failed intervention into Somalia, but comparing it to the NFL doesn’t qualify as analysis (unless you’re going to be a great deal more nuanced).
Regarding peak oil, FM didn’t understand my criticism of the Hubbert model in 2006, yet by 2008 he had come to agree with it. In 2006 I argued:

my criticisms concern the Hubbert model and its inability to account for the feedback effects between oil consumption, production, and price.

Lo and behold, in 2008 FM was complaining that there wasn’t any econometric modeling of peak oil - with the implied desired to include price-demand feedback loops. [For the record, my conclusion is (and has been) that primarily due to this shortcoming, the peak oil model is insufficient and inappropriate to serve as the driving guide for policy decisions. Yes, oil is finite, but energy and national security policy must be informed by more nuanced models than geologically deterministic ones that hold oil demand as exogenous.]
I also corrected FM when he was complaining that all Secretary Gates was doing was making speeches about change and not actually instituting change, but played out more in email than on the blog.
Also, while they aren’t on my site, an accurate cataloging of “smackdowns” would need to include a zinger like this one from Weeks and this concise bull’s eye response from the Small Wars Council.

“The United States’ administrations … must recognize that Iran is a big power,” he said. “Having said that, we consider ourselves to be a human force and a cultural power and hence a friend of other nations. We have never sought to dominate others or to violate the rights of any other country.”

Regional power? Definitely. A major power? No. Look at China if you want to see what an emerging great power looks like.

China now produces approximately 97% of the world’s rare-earth oxides, the raw materials that can be further refined into metals and blended into alloys that can be made into finished components.Over the past year, China has imposed global export quotas on the elements. Its Commerce Ministry has said total exports for the year would be capped at just under 30,300 metric tons, down 40% from last year.

Sounds scary, right? Sounds as if China could really use this for a serious strategic advantage. But wait…

Earlier this week, London-based Industrial Metals magazine and the New York Times reported that China had blocked a shipment of the metals, in retaliation for Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing boat captain on Sept. 7 amid a territorial dispute. Officials in Japan’s foreign and trade ministries said they weren’t aware of such an embargo.

Not a very terrifying signal if your target doesn’t notice it.
There is a larger issue here. 97% market share would permit China to make a disruptive short-term embargo on exports. I doubt that this short-term disruption would buy China much, however, because it would carry a host of negative consequences for China. First, it would stoke regional fears and mistrust of China, which is already strengthening the position of the U.S. Second, it would foster the medium- to long-term development of alternative supply in the U.S., which the WSJ article indicates is already happening.
The problem China faces going forward is that its increasing power will provoke a distrusting backlash, which will provoke some reflexive resentment (”How come everyone is so angry at us? It’s not fair!”). Everything is happening so quickly for the PRC - relative to the rise of the U.S. at least - that it will have to do some serious maturing awfully fast if it wants to avoid feeding a self-fulfilling prophecy of being “encircled” by states hoping to contain it. A judicious and balanced U.S. foreign policy can help meet that maturing great power halfway, but the new kid on the block will make some mistakes that - hopefully - will lead to learning moments (including crises) without escalating into violent or costly disasters.

In a report set for release Wednesday, the panel states that “it is vital to the national security of the United States, and to Western civilization at large, that we do what we can to empower Islam’s authentic moderates and reformers.”

And what, pray tell, can we do to empower Islam’s authentic moderates and reformers? I contend that the answer is “very little.”

“Empowering the condign elements of Islam requires a candid assessment, which acknowledges the strength of Shariah - just as defeat of 20th century totalitarian ideologies required an acknowledgment of, and respect for, their malevolent capabilities.”

Let us not be too quick to reflexively think that direct action is the best strategy here. Much as we have to be careful to not support Iranian dissident movements too overtly - lest we give the Iranian regime an easy narrative to discredit them (”they’re American spies”) - we have to be careful to not think that moderate Muslims want to be overtly associated with the U.S. government. The friction produced by the collision of Islam and modernity creates some dramatic tensions which have consequences for the U.S. - but this doesn’t mean that we can engineer them away, any more than the Ottoman Empire could have engineered the Protestant Reformation.
Absent some serious discussion of the tools we have at our disposal and their prospect for success, I would not follow any of these policy recommendations. Furthermore, the entire perspective overlooks one of the primary strengths of our society: its pluralism. I believe that that is a major reason why there is less tension between the American population at large and its Islamic immigrants than there is in Europe (where national identity is more tied to specific cultural, religious and ethnic characteristics). We have weathered many different waves of immigration from religious groups that were viewed at the time as posing a problem to our society. I haven’t seen any evidence yet that we have to make a radical departure from this track record.

Of course Noah is nearly rendered mute by the over-awing display of bureaucracy - I’m sympathetic, since I had a similar response when I was first exposed to it - but this isn’t news. I saw that chart at least four years ago. It’s been kicking around at least that long. And, while I’m picking nits, it isn’t a powerpoint slide. It never was intended to be one. It is a massive wall chart, as Noah points out in his post, so his title is misleading. [By the way, that other infamous powerpoint slide was a summary graphic from a system dynamics model that had been kicking around for a long time too before it got media attention. Which doesn’t excuse it being used inappropriately - and system dynamics usually IS used inappropriately - but it is an important bit of context.]
Anyway. We’ll have a wave of Daily Show skits about the absurdity of the acquisitions system, which will be fun, but there isn’t anything new here.

Note - the U.S. platform doesn’t have a community of users, hence it is irrelevant. The tech needs to be there, but without an active community a platform is like a stage without actors.
First Haiti, now this. Crowdsourcing tools for disaster response - like CrisisCommons (cited by DR) - has arrived and the question in the future will be: who is providing the platform? They are the sysadmin - both literally and figuratively.