Giridharadas' New York Times article on this is particularly striking, arguing that:

This was not terror — not as Indians understood it. This was war...As a surprise attack became a 48-hour struggle, the burden of responding transferred from the police to soldiers. The language was of war: television anchors spoke of buildings “sanitized” and “flushed out,” of “final assaults” and “collateral damage.” Helicopters hovered over Mumbai, and commandos dropped onto roofs. The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the shapeless, omnidirectional chaos of Iraq.

I'm not sure yet what meaning can be attributed to events in Mumbai, or how this fits into the broader contexts of international politics and terrorism. I hope this is very much a one-off, never to be repeated - but it is possible that this is the continuation of a trend to escalation.

the act was also written in the early days of TeeVee and is seriously hindering our efforts to mount an effective information campaign on teh internets and such against sworn enemies like al-Qaeda

As has been seen in the emergence of stories such as the use of white phosphorous as an anti-personnel weapon, it may be that teh internets are now revealing false information more quickly than before - outright propaganda, aside from ethical issues, may simply end up looking bad. A better solution would seem to be an honest, ethical engagement with others - moving beyond propaganda to be honest about what is going well and to offer quick, open acknowledgement of (and restitution for) mistakes. I would heart that, and I don't think that Al Qaeda would be please: such an approach does have the potential to lead to significantly more effective Information Operations (IO).

One more thing - it's interesting to see that lolspeak has infected Abu Muqawama. This meme does seem to spread with remarkable efficacy: I wonder how long till we start seeing IO reports headlined 'we can haz infosphere'? More worryingly, I am not sure whether this would be a good or a bad thing.

*Nick Davies' excellent Flat Earth News is well worth a read for it's excellent discussion of this.

Americans' fear of a terrorism could create a mass outbreak of a psychosomatic illness -- even in absence of any real attack -- -- creating a fake epidemic that could overwhelm hospitals attempting to treat any real victims.

Adding to the confusion, the symptoms of a mass pyschogenic illness look much like symptoms of an anthrax attack, avian flu outbreak or chemical attack.

This type of attack (there have been previous examples of such illness spreading) would be an interesting use of the virtual dimension: this is used operationally, and much of the impact of an attack is also in the realm of the virtual. Of course, the effects of a mass outbreak of psychosomatic illness wouldn't stay there: this would also have very 'real' effects.

Pakistan denies this. However - if accurate - it does give an interesting perspective on the links between Pakistan and the Taliban, and the implications of this for Afghanistan.

The food vendors in SE Asia are the creators of some of the greatest cuisine known to humanity, and one should always partake whenever possible. They are also some of the best HUMINT in the region. When they are not in an area that they usually populate, be wary; when they arrive in even greater numbers than one usually sees, this is either: (1) a Festival (which you can confirm with a calendar and newspaper) or (2) a massive protest is coming.

Spencer Ackerman, in yesterday’s Washington Independent, claims I told him the Iraq war was “f*cking stupid”. He did not seek to clear that quote with me, and I would not have approved it if he had. If he HAD sought a formal comment, I would have told him what I have said publicly before: in my view, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was an extremely serious strategic error. But the task of the moment is not to cry over spilt milk, rather to help clean it up: a task in which the surge, the comprehensive counterinsurgency approach, and our troops on the ground are admirably succeeding.

Ackerman - who wrote the original story - has since reported that

In the course of a piece I'm proud of about David Kilcullen's forthcoming strategy-level counterinsurgency handbook, I included a profanity-laden quote from him about the wisdom of the Iraq war. This was a mistake on my part and I take full responsibility for the fact that it overshadowed what I consider Kilcullen's valuable, serious, and hard-learned counterinsurgency insights...I included the profanity because I thought it underscored the depth of his commitment to try to dig American strategy out of the morass of Iraq, which I and many others view as uncomplicatedly admirable. What I should have realized is that the profanity overwhelms the broader points presented in the handbook and about Dave's personality and professional vision. For that, I apologize, not only to Dave, but to my readers, who I hope will pay attention to those broader points despite my error in judgement.

What's interesting about this discussion (and I highly recommend reading the whole post/article) is that the dispute is not so much about whether Kilcullen believes that the Iraq war was misguided, but whether the tone was appropriate. I'm not sure myself what constitutes an appropriate tone for this kind of debate. While I was struck by Kilcullen's statement and expletive, I wonder if such a turn of phrase is a distraction from the debate around such 'serious' issues - or if it helps to hammer home a significant point.

After nearly seven years of costly strategic ignorance in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a coming handbook written mostly by a former top aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus seeks to instruct senior civilian policy-makers about the complexities of counterinsurgency.

What stood out, though, is how David Kilcullen (the author of the handbook) assesses the decision to invade Iraq:

Asked for comment, the handbook's chief author, David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer who is now an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, explained that it tells policy-makers to "think very, very carefully before intervening." More bluntly, Kilcullen, who helped Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, called the decision to invade Iraq "stupid" -- in fact, he said "f***ing stupid" -- and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual's lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future.

"The biggest stupid idea," Kilcullen said, "was to invade Iraq in the first place."

Kilcullen explained that the handbook will not apply to future operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. "We try not to forge doctrine around an example," he said. Instead, it frames questions about supporting counterinsurgencies in partner or potential-partner countries through the prisms of national interest; graduated levels of commitment, and cost/benefit analysis. It offers numerous warnings about how arduous counterinsurgency is. In a paragraph about the "characteristics" of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen bolds the words "complex," "violent," "difficult," "controversial," "ambiguous," "long-duration" and "high-cost."

This is a significant acknowledgement, and it is important to remember such failures. I would follow Jacqueline Rose's argument in Why War?

“Hang on to failure…if you want to avoid going to war (Rose 1993, 37)

By hanging on to the memory of US-led failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be possible for policymakers to avoid going to war - or at least avoid going to war in the same way - in future. The handbook itself also sounds very interesting:

"Counterinsurgency: A Guide for Policy-Makers" takes the lessons learned by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan and elevates them to the highest levels of national strategy...The handbook seeks to provide a framework for considering whether Washington should intervene in foreign countries' counterinsurgency operations, raising difficult questions about whether such nations deserve U.S. support; under what conditions that support should occur, and whether success is possible at acceptable cost. No systematic approach to strategic-level questions in counterinsurgency currently exists for senior U.S. government officials.[...]

The handbook instructs policy-makers about the necessity of using all elements of national power -- not just military force, but also diplomacy, development aid, the rule of law, academic disciplines and other specialties often considered peripheral to warfighting -- to triumph in counterinsurgency. Victory, as well, is defined as support for a foreign nation's ability to successfully govern, rather than a decisive U.S. military effort.

It sounds like this handbook covers a lot of important ground - I'll look forward to reading it.

Especially interesting about the programme is the way that this training is placed in the context of American culture/s and of certain American ideals. How are conceptions of American Dreams being changed by the long 'war on terror'? And, in trying to understand and engage with other cultures, will conceptions of what it is to be American also change?

The popular media conception is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers -- military, government corporate -- and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated...These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living..And some of the hackers are good. Over the years, they have become more sophisticated in both tools and techniques. They're stealthy. They do good network reconnaissance. My guess is what the Pentagon thinks is the problem is only a small percentage of the actual problem.[...]

If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.

In this regard, they're more like a non-state actor.

One thing to draw out from Scheier's post is the possibility that - because these groups are functioning like non-state actors - their cyber attacks could be made considerably more effective. Loose networks of hackers can afford to try a lot of different things - some of which will be prospectively and/or retrospectively stupid - and give nodes in the network considerable autonomy.

Such networks are robust enough to risk the loss of a number of nodes, and to risk serious failures: by doing this, they are more able to innovate than would otherwise be the case, and can become extremely problematic for state actors.

A couple of weeks after Paparone's article went online, Chris Anderson posted The End of Theory on Wired. For Anderson, today's deluge of data means that conventional approaches to the scientific method - I think he would include positivism in this - is now obsolete. However, what is also obsolete is certain postpositivistic approaches to making sense of the world, and researching how we make sense of it:

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right...Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.

Anderson's argument is itself problematic: the data deluge he diagnoses (perhaps something akin to the loss of any real behind an excessive hyperreality, as analysed by Baudrillard?) does not seem to me to dictate a prioritising of mathematical analysis, or a complete end to the utility of a (social) scientific method. People can, and do, do effective work in unknown and shifting contexts, and there is also the potential for political and military actors to themselves create the contexts in which they work.

That said, I find Anderson's short piece is compelling in a number of ways. Anderson does make a strong argument against the type of positivism and postpositivism that Paperone finds in FM 3-0. One can argue that many of the current opponents of the US - for example, the networked insurgencies in Iraq - have already moved beyond postpositivism, and are enthusiastically embracing a number of aspects of the petabyte age.

States and state militaries have struggled and are struggling to respond to this. The move to a type of postpositivism discussed by Paperone is interesting, but I suspect that it will not be a sufficient response to such opponents.

Data Wars is a three-year research project which investigates new spaces of governing in the war on terror. The project analyses the ways in which the mobility of people and the mobility of money are being governed in the war on terror, and aims to understand how commercial data - including financial records and passenger information - become used for security decisions in Europe. Data Wars also examines the wider social and political implications of these security developments.

The website also has a del.icio.us news feed - which you can subscribe to, or read on the Data Wars site, for the latest stories about the data-led war on terror. The use of data in security and conflict is currently a significant and controversial area of development: hopefully, the new website and news feed will be useful for those wishing to follow the European aspects of this.

More on the latter paper - in particular - is still to come. However, one interesting link to flag up for now: I was very interested to read Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian's paper on "Addressing the Natural Resource Curse: An Illustration from Nigeria". They argue in favour of "directly distributing the oil revenues to the public", and suggest that - as well as Nigeria - Iraq could be a state in which this policy proved effective.

While their analysis is certainly not perfect - for example, Lindy Davies raises some issues with the account of causality in play in the paper - I do think that this is an interesting proposal, and potentially suggests a means to address some of the problems in Iraq.

More on this to follow...

While technology may offer considerable opportunities for the US military - as suggested by their substantial investment in robot technologies - we do not yet know what this technology can become. As the complexity of US military networks increases - incorporating, for example, more and more autonomous robots - the potential for the networked accident also grows.

See also: interesting Guardian article by Sharkey, on robot wars.