Glen; I am reading the Fort Bragg Cartel book. It is more than a little bit scary. Particularly scary is the admission that the surgical teams in Afghanistan didn't have enough Arabic translators and instead used "nodal" targeting. I assume it means they killed the most recent 5 contacts in a targets phone, and then did the same to their contacts, and so on, until they ran out of contacts. In computer terms, I would describe it as a depth first search where every node is gruesomely killed. It may start as a cyclic graph but quickly becomes less cyclic.
It also makes me wonder if Albuquerque doesn't share some of the problems as Fort Bragg(or whatever it is called now). Ever since moving to Albuquerque, I wondered why the neighborhoods immediately around the air force base are some of the most desperate slums in the city. It seems like they should reflect the wealth that is inside of the base, but those areas have some of the worst problems. _ Cody Smith _ [email protected] On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 11:06 AM Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > Pieter Steenekamp wrote: > > > 5. Something else I see (the technology factor) > There’s one more thread that seems worth adding. Modern technology makes > war both harder and less rewarding in some cases: > > Drones and cheap precision weapons allow even small countries to inflict > significant damage on larger powers. > > Economic sanctions, while imperfect, can be deployed faster and with more > coordination than in the past. > > Supply chains are global, which means that aggressors risk cutting > themselves off from the very technologies and markets they depend on. > > In other words, the tools of modern globalization — finance, trade, tech — > double as tools of deterrence. You don’t need a world government to stop > wars; you just need a world that is so interconnected that aggressors > quickly pay unbearable costs. > > > I don't remember (either) exactly where I read it or what was the author's > opinion and what is mine... I think it was Shirer's Berlin Diary > > however: > > the salient point made was that both WWI and WWII were executed > somewhat because the "normal" balance of power is in favor of defensive > technology... but that at every technological leap forward, there is a > brief period where the favor flips so it becomes acutely advantageous to > prosecute an invasion for a short while. Germany's Wermacht, not only in > terms of hard technology (planes, tanks, bombs) but also soft (tactics) > gave them a temporary advantage as an aggressor. > > On the other hand, Shirer's accounts also lead me to look into the > asymmetry of industrial and human input to WWII and see how the Allies > ultimately overwhelmed the Axis with industrial might. I forget how big > the British Empire was at the time... between Canada and Australia and > beyond, they were *much* more than a tiny island nation... and of course > their biggest (former) colony of all was the US. I think i read that the > amount of hardware we through at Germany (and Italy and Japan) was > ultimately about 10x that mounted by them.. > > Ukraine's acutely effective defense reflects (IMO) the combination of a > strong tech-indusrial base and aesthetic, a strong "homeland defense" > motivation and the emergence of new modes of defensive warfare (Drone range > for example, being naturally asymmetric in favor of defensive use. The > trick they pulled "smuggling" a host of them deep into Russian territory > notwithstanding. > > Just to harp on one of my hobby-horses, I suspect the large scale > conflicts of humanity amongst ourselves to be a reflection of the sheer > forces between the goals of the individual/family/community and larger > scales like city/nation-states, multi-national corps, global-religions, > etc. A natural tension between scales. > > > > > .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / > ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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