Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of Wired Magazine, both print and online editions. I have linked quite liberally to the blog Danger Room hosted by Noah Shactman and they often post cutting edge military technology stories. Last night, I saw this post at LGF about a list of smart people posted on Wired Magazine called “Fifteen people the next President should listen to” and took a look. I haven’t read through every bio or link but three stand out to me: an anthropologist who has been trying to get the military into studying “human terrain” named Montgomery McFate who caused quite a ruckus in both the military and anthropology fields. Good for her, both these insular communities need shaking up!
Then there’s an environmentalist named Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based environmental think tank. Take a look at the link and check out his slides on the world water situation, something I’ve written about here. The wars of the future will be over water, not oil, as I’ve said before. The final one I want to highlight is US Army Colonel A. Thomas Ball, Jr.
Chief of Staff U.S. Army, Pacific (USARPAC). I served with Colonel Ball’s brother Dan in the Pentagon and all three of us were in Iraq around the same time this year. This posting highlights Colonel AT Ball’s command of TF ODIN, an organization set up to disrupt IED’s and their makers, from what I heard, they did a very good job in Iraq.
No matter which person is elected President, I agree with Wired that we need to look beyond the inside Washington crowd and reach out to non-traditional thinkers and innovators, this list appears to be a good start. On the afternoon of 9/11 while I was working for the SEALs in California, I said that the next day, Secretary Rumsfeld should stop every fourth person walking in the Pentagon, shake their hands, thank them for their work, give them a plaque and tell them their services are no longer needed. While some good folks would have been shown the off ramp, the really talented ones would find new employment and the ones that couldn’t, well, probably shouldn’t?
Then I proposed the government should go into the offices of Wired Magazine and grab everyone there and swear them in and direct commission them into the government or at least put them on contract to produce new thinking. We are seven years past 9/11 and not a lot of imaginative thinking coming from the five sided building.
Sigh.