Mike Pence Says His Role Model Vice President is Dick Cheney

Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence discusses his VP role model and his debate prep on “This Week.”

Let’s stop pretending what he ( Pence) is talking about. Cheney was the “grownup” in the relationship and Bush was the “spoiled kid”.

We can see from where Mike Pence is coming from. He will have to run the country and become the commander-in-chief, because, like Bush, Trump isn’t up to it. He is not completely ignorant, but stupid.

Bush, in a stupor, had to have his Chief of Staff run the war in Iraq, because he, Bush, thought it was about another Crusades.

My guess is that Pence will continue the war against Islam, while ignoring Nixon’s connection to Globalization, while Trump moves America towards authoritarianism. #fail

Source: Mike Pence Says His Role Model Vice President is Dick Cheney

Soft Power, A Strategic Theory Perspective

If we label the ideal commercial person as a “business manager” and the ideal military person as a “soldier”, we would label the ideal soft power institution employee as a “hippie” without the negative stereotypical characteristics.

Right on!

But more importantly, I think he brings up the point that, in today’s world, both hard power and soft power are basically the same culturally, with the structure being the difference between soft and hard power.

Hard power is structure more like a 2×4, while soft power is more like a feather pillow. Most countries would rather get hit with a pillow than a 2×4, but no mater how you look at it, you’re still getting hit.

Seyditz89 says we need to change the culture of soft power, and I would not argue against this. I especially like the part where seyditz89 turns it over to the hippies.

However, power is power and when you start messing with it between countries there is a price to be paid, and the outcome of both forms of power just depends on who has the most energy to pay with.

So perhaps we should develop a different form of power.

Network wise, soft power runs in phases much like 3-phase power running an industrial motor.

The flow of currant that runs the motor not only alternates in direction but is carried on different degrees in waves at the changing of direction.

These “waves” of soft power come into the target country in the form of resources, with the hope of changing the way the motor moves.

Culturally wise, the more powerful country doesn’t want the motor to stop turning inside the less powerful country, it just doesn’t want to give it any more power, and it wants the less powerful country to act more like the more powerful country.

Changing how another nation of power acts is a big problem, especially when the more powerful nation has less energy. That is basically where the U.S.A. is at. The U.S.A. is a nation of little energy, but is able to, because of its culture, express that energy very quickly.

So the third form of power, which I shall call here and now hippie power, would run parallel to the nation less powerful and only connect perpendicular to the less powerful nation, much like our connection with Yemen today.

I am not sure this less love and more sex approach would be hippie approved,  but yeah, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

1 out of 3 is probably better than what our soft power is doing today.

H/T Zenpundit

via MilPub: Soft Power, A Strategic Theory Perspective.

Chinese navy buildup no threat to US, but a possible threat to Japan

That caused China to begin its arms race with the United States. It has since replaced its late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s practice of taoguang yanghui, literally the practice of “keeping a low profile and hiding brightness”, with intensive publicising of its weapons development.

OK, China hasn’t begun an arms race with the United States, and, as for Deng Xiaoping’s practice of  ‘keeping a low profile and hiding brightness”, I say China has begun transitioning to a period of transparency.

I think transparency is helpful for both the people of china and the U.S.A..

China has long built its foreign policy on a strategy of taking resources, building infrastructure, and replacing existing structures (that says for the U.S. Navy to stay home) that to bring any “brightness” into the conversation is refreshing.

Let’s hope the leaders of the U.S.A. are equally transparent in its relationship to China, as any threat to Japan is a threat to the U.S.A..

via Chinese navy buildup no threat to US, but a possible threat to Japan « China Daily Mail.

Chinese state media says China makes American Christmas possible « China Daily Mail

The article argues that the West could not celebrate Christmas without China’s exports and that we should spend the holiday expressing gratitude for Chinese manufacturing.

Well at least not if you use a Apple, but then India pretty much owns Microsoft  so it just depends on which side your junk falls on, the left or right.

So is Microsoft dead?

I don’t know. Some of my friends on Facebook would strongly disagree.

via Chinese state media says China makes American Christmas possible « China Daily Mail.

Red Flags Over Tokyo

“The Japanese spirit is still very poor,” she said.  Maybe MacArthur was right all along.

This post takes you through so much that this last sentence is very telling about any pivot by the US towards the Pacific.

via Red Flags Over Tokyo | timshorrock.com.

The Flag

A General on a mission is called a flag-general. In today’s world, of video games and simulations, it is important for a flag-general, especially with a Red team under his/her flag, to understand not just when he loses, but that when he wins is also an important event to note.

Because it is harder to prove a negative than a positive, the flag-general may not remember whose side he is on, and, because all flag-generals are winners, it is doubly hard to prove, by their Red team, that they are losers.

As an example, if you are a flag-general and just bought a house and,  if you are on your hands and knees, crawling around under that house looking for only God  knows what, then, perhaps, you haven’t really won.

If this is true that you didn’t actually win, it is because you didn’t know your enemy. The reason you didn’t know your enemy is because the Red team hid the enemy from you. That is what Red teams do, they hide things from you.

But what we do know is that a flag-general would do only what his God knows, to complete his mission. This is because his God is under his flag, and, of course, because the reverse of that is true, they are both positives.

The Romney-Cheney Doctrine

Out of Romney’s 24 special advisors on foreign policy, 17 served in the Bush-Cheney administration. If Romney were to win, it’s likely that many of these people would serve in his administration in some capacity — a frightening prospect given the legacy of this particular group. The last time they were in government, it was disastrous.

via The Romney-Cheney Doctrine – By Representative Adam Smith | Foreign Policy.

Maybe disastrous, but at least they didn’t put 30 million children on heath insurance.

Winning

I think the verdict

is out that winning

is more important than any calculation that can be made.

Unfortunately, winning requires a calculation of any kind. So I guess this is one bridge too far.

Just for you interested, my posting for my busiest day was called The Human Condition.

 Not sure what the Human Condition was about, , probably something about Jesus of Nazareth, because I am speaking from a Christian nation, but just giving some context.

What is the Littoral Combat Ship in your words, and what should LCS be looking to the future?

The Littoral Combat Ship is, in a word, a challenge. A challenge to understand, a challenge to develop, a challenge to build. The program is a challenge to manage, to defend, to get to sea. To train for and crew, to support, to maintain. To develop mission modules for, to perfect and operate dozens of new technologies in those modules, to control those technologies in an operational environment. A challenge to develop a concept of operations for, to convey to the fleet what it should be used for, to keep from being misused.

via Information Dissemination: What is the Littoral Combat Ship in your words, and what should LCS be looking to the future?.

After listening to the strategy of Afghanistan unfold a few years ago, with terms like COIN, inkspots, and ratios (like 1 solder for every 50 civilians) it’s not hard to get a handle on the strategy of the LCS.

The LCS are the ink–spots, and the strategy is one of  connecting those ink-spot through collaboration and maneuver,  in an ocean that is getting smaller due to globalization.

The ships were designed with a main battery unlike anything ever carried by a combatant ship: empty space. Big, empty mission bays ready to accept large containers of equipment and systems, along with flight decks much larger in proportion to other surface fighting ships.

The thing is, these ships (LCS), like the F35s are designed to fight networks through collaboration and manuverbility, not through force. In a network war, the one who has the most collaboration and is able to maneuver the force  to its greatest advantage, without actually making the force go kinetic “wins”. Kinetic energy mostly destroys networks, and the battle of networks is one of connections, not disconnections.

What really needs to happen, is for a discussion to take place about who the enemy is.  I believe war is about economic considerations, and fought by people with little economic considerations. In the case of economic consideration then, China is the enemy. China has taken the position, once occupied by Japan, as the second greatest economy in the world, with the USA as number one.

The difference between the USA and China then is that the USA is the wealthiest, while China is the country of greatest growth. In physics, the USA would have the greatest potential energy, while China would have the greatest kinetic energy. When it comes to force, potential energy has it over kinetic, but when you add all the potential and kinetic energy in a system together, it adds up to zero. So while the USA has more force, China has more velocity (moves in more areas), but together they cancel each other out. And that is what would happen in a real war.

China, in the South China Sea, Africa, and South America, has taken-up a strategy that I call build, replace, and hold, as it moves through-out the world. It has been a winning strategy that continues its growth, even as China experiences a recession, much like the rest of the world.

China builds the infrastructure resource-rich nations need, replaces  the way needed to extract those resources with her own ways, then holds the resources as her own, to do with as she wishes.  China’s way that it moves its kinetic energy is quick and dirty, and the way it is able to  hold the connections it makes together is by throwing dollars at it.

The LCS was created to “work” those connections. The ” Big, empty mission bays ready to accept large containers of equipment and systems,” won’t be accepting US modules (unless those in the USA who fight wars for little economic consideration step-in) but from other countries.

The reason the modules will not be US, as China continues to buy the US government debt and hold resources, it will want to replace ships in the US fleet with its own,  such as the carriers and submarines she just built, and would expect  them to replace US carriers and submarines eventually, considering.

like the F35, the LCS where built in opposition to those considerations.

Chart of the day: Why GM and SAIC naturally decided to pair up

Pretty obvious, actually.

Far short of merger, but the same logic holds:  you are weak where I am strong and vice versa.  Why not ally and crush all opposition on global basis.

This would-be globally integrated enterprise as a preview of globalization’s coming attractions.

From an Economist story on Chinese carmakers.

via Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Globlogization – Blog – Chart of the day: Why GM and SAIC naturally decided to pair up.

What Tom is describing is called a  “Cheap Trick” (Tempo, Venkatesh Rao).

Cheap Trick: In the Double Freytag model, the moment when a key insight turns around the trajectory of increasing entropy in a deep story. A cheap trick follows the exploration phase. The notion of cheap trick is essentially identical to Clausewitz’ notion of coup d’oeil (strike of the eye). Cheap tricks provide elegant, organizing insights that allow a decision-maker to make temporary and local sense of a high-entropy mental model. Cheap tricks also provide a window of opportunity for high-leverage decision-making.

The cheap trick in the deep story between GM and the Chinese corporation is defined in these words: “…you are weak where I am strong and vice versa.” In the exploration of the automobile market in both economies (east and west) have become so complex and the increase in what is not known is so great that the relationships in the narrative within the market has begun to spike into a Cheap Trick, to release both complexity and that what is not known.

A Cheap Trick is strategy, and in Tom’s example, the way (logic, of  the strategy) is defined in the words, “Why not ally and crush all opposition on a global basis.”

A cheap trick is strategy, but not the final strategy, so what is known about this Cheap Trick is that it is flawed. As Venkatesh says on page 77 in his book Tempo, “Every such insight is flawed, since it is based on excluding some part of reality as noise.”

What GM is excluding from some part of reality as noise is the fact that China is monopolizing the market around a benevolent leadership that is centralized. The reality is that the east (China) moves to a different tempo than the west (USA).

While the cheap trick and the logic behind it might be the same, GM and China (if one can distingush one as western and the other eastern anymore) have completely different Liminal Passages.

With different liminal passages, but with a need to achieve the same tempo (if harmony is desired between the east and west) the liminal passages have to merge. To merge the liminal passages, the separation event need to need to happen at a time that gives retrospection a chance to reach the same level in the deep story.

Once the same level has been reached in the deep story, the relationship between the east and west can grow deep together, if not close. Otherwise the east and west need to orient themselves within the same OODA loop, which is not easy if the relationship is not close in mind nor deep in heart.

The centralization of an authoritarian benevolent leadership that is represented in the phrase: “Why not ally and crush all opposition on a global basis” seems to be what is dividing most of the customers in the American market, and what both sides divided seem to not want.

The Tea Party (TP) and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) both seem to agree we need less centralization and neither are acting in a benevolent manner. While most Americans are not either TP nor OWS, the logic that binds these two is distintive American, i.e. they want freedom to act and freedom to decide.

It may prove hard to sell cars in such a divided market that is together on this one issue, the decentralization of the market into one deep passage that benefits only themselves.

It could be that the Cheap Trick that GM and China are using isn’t flawed in its logic, it is flawed in the end that both GM and China are equally moving towards, as they combine the means (resources) to that end.

As we are living within the “valley” of that Cheap Trick (we are obviously past the “sense making” of that trick) it may be that GM’s decision to centralize into one monopoly to rule the market together with a  benevolent China, will give the US customers cars that we need (cars that will not destroy the economies of the world) instead of what we want (cars that give us freedom).

However, giving us choices only of what we need has never worked out that well in America. It is going to be hard for GM and China to build cars China needs and the US wants, when considering the resources (means) used.