Keep AFRICOM HQ out of Africa
BARNETT BLOG
Tom got an email asking for thoughts/reactions/explanations on the article New AFRICOM staff to be mainly situated outside Africa
Tom writes:
As expected. No desire to favor any one of the five regions, as the CJTF-HOA gets franchised to the other four. Better to keep it out of Africa, and best--as I argue--to put it in Northern VA to highlight and enable it's "3D" approach of synergistically blending defense, diplomacy and development.
Pollution gets too costly in Asia once it starts costing connectivity
ARTICLE: "Hong Kong struggles to halt exodus of foreigners: Local workforce talent, air pollution cited as factors," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 24 September 2007, p. 7A.
Not much to be done about rising local talent, nor the heightened buzz factor with Shanghai, but when 35 percent of your businesses say they have trouble getting potential hires to move to your city, you've got a real issue on your hands, especially if "super-clean" Singapore is your main competition.
The split in Special Ops
ESSAY: Support grows for standing up an unconventional warfare command, BY SEAN D. NAYLOR, Armed Forces Journal, September 2007
Even inside the Special Ops Forces, those who engage in SysAdmin work their own SysAdmin command.
I wrote about this split in Blueprint for Action: there is a huge cultural divide--believe it or not--between the civil affairs/engagement/training crowd and the direct action/trigger pullers.
Civil affairs was largely shunted off to the Reserves and Special Ops Command after Vietnam (the latter being stood up in the early 1980s after Desert One) because the Army didn't want to be associated with nation/capacity-building.
Now, in this frontier-integrating age, that skill set is in high demand, thus you see more bureaucratic agitation of this sort--as in, "give us our due!"
Makes sense to me in a Long War.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
