Center for a New American Security

Now that I am no longer blogging on a daily basis, the best way to see what has caught my eye in a given day is by following this blog's Twitter feed. I know it can be an annoying bit of technology (not to mention a wee presumptuous to think you would want to read what I read), but it's a convenient way for me to link to articles and books of note.

First off, let me praise those bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Nico Pitney, Robert Mackey -- who have used Twitter feeds from Iran to tirelessly live-blog the uprising in Tehran. But all the same, I am happy that articles and analysis are now popping up that question the actual usefulness of Twitter as a tool of the revolution.

Today's Washington Post had a really interesting op-ed by two U.S. pollsters:

Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

 

A good op-ed from a fellow Iraq veteran. Just one quibble: sometimes being sensitive to cultural nuances is war-fighting prowess.

When I was in Afghanistan and Iraq (between 2001 and 2004), I was so impressed with the satellite imagery we were always given of objectives and areas of interest. It was good, I thought at the time, to be in the service of a powerful nation-state capable of providing such resources to its lowly foot soldiers. Fast forward just a few years, then, to an era when -- thanks to Google Earth -- every Tom, Dick and Harry has access to similar technology.

I am now back in Tennessee. Apologies to anyone in DC I failed to meet on my brief trip -- I'll be back in January.

Kip is supposedly responsible for technology commentary on this blog, and as Charlie reminds him occasionally, e.g., today, he has not exactly lived up to that responsibility.

But from time to time, the occasional story pops up on cell phones, and in the vein of going with what you know, here it is (thanks Charlie for sending me the article).

Kip is fascinated by a few things:

War
Afghanistan
Cell Phones

War, because the management of violence is my profession.

Afghanistan because I know we will be there long after we've left Iraq, and we (that is the institutional military to include myself) still know so little seven years into fighting there.

The global food crisis is perhaps the least reported big event of the year. It stands to kill far more people than the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China. First it will kill through starvation, and then through the conflict over resources that it spawns. At a conference of experts that Kip observed on Afghanistan several weeks ago, all agreed that rising food prices were the single thing capable of throwing the country into utter and perhaps unrecoverable chaos.

"How do you fight an enemy who hides among the innocent?" asks a new Air Force Commercial.

"Never let him out of your sight."

The screen shot is of a Predator drone.

Whether the Air Force as a whole is willing to accept the Predator as the be all of air power, Kip is doubtful. Even if it were willing (and no one in Afghanistan would complain for a second about having more surveillance, not to mention airlift, assets), it is easy to overestimate the usefulness of such technology.