William Gibson is blogging again. Why?
"Just about seven years ago I happened to find myself in San Francisco with a very pleasant man who was then an Office Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. We got along well, and he introduced me to several new ideas (mainly the "netwar" paradigm of warfare, which is genuinely a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, and which I'll return to in a later post). I came away feeling highly optimistic about, of all things, the US military. He'd assured me that "NO MORE VIETNAMS" might as well be carved above the West Point gates as Prime Directive, because "asymmetric conflict with amorphous networks of terrorists, who repurpose civilian technologies to terrible ends" was going to be where it was at from now on in -- and that Vietnam was always going to be what you got if you stuck with the old paradigm.
One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be."
Yes, of course there must be smart people, also in the U.S. military, who'd actually have an idea of what to do. A better idea than starting some old-fashioned ground war, against the wrong people, sending several trillion dollars up in smoke, and pretending that everything is going great.
The Rocky Mountain Institute just published a co-study they did with the Pentagon about the viability of and potentially juicy profits that could be made from an oil free U.S.The online pdf version is available for free from them. I believe freedom from oil dependence willbe a tremendous help not only to the US but the world as well.What can citizens do to get the word out? How can we get the ear & attention of decision makers to listen to folks like the authors of this study and stop them from obeying GRUNCH & LAWCAP?