I'd Just Be the Catcher in the Rye

 

65 millions copies in print since 1951 and we are still divided into one of two camps.  We either glorify Holden Caulfield as a teen sounding the anthem of rebellion for generations of our youth or we vilify his disregard for normalcy along with his x-rated coming of age, and attempt to shield our children from the stark reality of the real world.  65 million copies in print yet it still holds records as the most censored text in American history. It’s an enigma.  I will not attempt to understand the irony of such numbers or dissect what many believe to be the perfect novel, alongside one or two others, Huckleberry Finn and Gatsby of particular note.  Legions of academics have come before and attempted to pull forth the inner meaning of the scenes in his dorm, the stories of his friends and family, in particular the death of his brother and relationship with his younger sister.  Even more poignant would be the potential deflowering of Jane Gallagher, the girl next store, which seems perilously close to the first published record of date rape, for which Caulfield gets a bloody mouth trying to rise in her defense, but for which J.D. Salinger, never takes the opportunity to investigate fully.  What a missed opportunity for what would surely be a fantastic prescience of a modern scourge.  

Beyond Salinger’s description of what it might like to be “Down and Out in Paris and France”, ala Orwell, we never quite arrive.  When Kerouac paints the seedy underbelly of America in, “On the Road” Caulfield can’t quite go those places, after all he’s only 16.   And beyond “Gatsby”, F. Scott’s descent into alcoholism, in “the Beautiful and the Damned”, we don’t see much change from being on streets in New York a generation later.  It’s still no less unforgiving of character.

In modern times, perhaps Haruki Murakami comes the closest to being on the street, as a teenager, but for him it’s in Tokyo, and with him “After Dark” touches something that Salinger has brilliantly described, but has left unnamed.  Murakami doesn’t shy away from depression and suicide.  Salinger ran through the door, yet left it all unnamed. I haven’t done a comprehensive search for other’s of the 65 million readers who think that Salinger accurately depicts teenage depression, but to me, this is his real genius.  Without a doubt, Salinger had first hand experience with depression, whether it's own or someone close to him...and what he has brought to us, since most schools seem to include it as required reading, should be the open conversation we have with our kids about depression and suicide.  This should be the conversation from “Catcher”, no one of being rebellious or being sexual or homosexual or dropping out of school or having a plan for our lives or the sage advice of Wilhelm Stekel.  Depression should be our first stop, those other topics, are heavily treated elsewhere.

I’m going to give the book 5-Stars and society’s reaction to the book 2.5-Stars (50/50 for those who worship it and those who censor it) even if for the wrong reasons.  I’m also going to give my teenage daughter 5-Stars for forcing me to read it, so she could talk to me about it’s deeper meaning--a meaning that she has referred to as it’s beautiful.  But just to clarify, the beauty for her is contained in the message that a “Catcher” is someone trying to ward off the corruption of innocence as we come of age...not my introduction of depression into the greater conversation...but that conversation will happen as well…

Dreaming of Wild Sheep

Add  “A Wild Sheep Chase’, to the reasons why I don’t like sheep.  My lifelong fear of sheep has had nothing to do with the Haruki Murakami’s magical mystery tour around Japan in search of an elusive mystery sheep with the powers of mind control...until now.  I did not know there was a mutant sheep on the loose in Japan and that sheep could in fact take over your body.  It’ exerts it’s mind control through a cyst it creates in your brain once it gets in, apparently through telekinesis while you sleep.  And,  if that’s not enough, this particular sheep is bent on no less than world domination.  Finding that sheep and destroying it’s evil  master plan describes this novel in a nutshell.

OK, maybe the story isn’t everybody's cup of tea.  It’s not my cup of tea, particular with my lifelong bias against sheep.  But in typical fashion, Murakami held my attention...in this case for two solid days at the beach.  He is a magnificent storyteller, of this we have always been assured.  Whereas I might have been disappointed by the plotline, I was not disappointed by his character descriptions, the Japanese vistas he paints, and the other reasons we keep turning his pages...his a-political view of world events, his ability to capture common life, and the torment in the mind of his main character...when by all accounts we should be putting the book down when plot starts to develop.  There could be no redeeming ending to this book...a complete flight of fancy...right down to the Sheepman who smoke’s Seven Stars and drinks brandy.  If androids were to dream of sheep, it wouldn't be this one.  Yet we have “A Wild Sheep Chase” in the portfolio and on our bookshelves.  

This is only my third Murakami  novel  I have read both “After Dark” and “Norwegian Wood”.  I have also read two of his non-fiction works.  I will read a few more.  Start with four stars for a Murakami novel full of his descriptive prose, and take off one star for sheep with mind control.

Seals Shouldn't Write Books

I bought the book, “No Easy Day” just after it was published about a year after the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL).  I never read it.   I wanted a trophy to commemorate the death of the cowardly schwein-hund and buying this book just seemed right. Uncertainty about his death in the caves of Tora Bora was suspected but wasn't a certainty.  Now it was no longer a maybe, anymore, the rat bastard was dead. Tracked by a tenacious analyst at US Intelligence she was 100% certain, the tall, lanky, man who walked the walled compound in Abbottabad, in white flowing robes was OBL. She was 100% right.  The world knew OBL was now erased from the planet by the force of the United States and sent to his resting place for the deck of the USS Carl Vinson at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. So when the book arrived, I just put it on the shelf and forgot about it.  I wasn’t ready.  

Also, controversy swirled in the media about the publication of the book by the Navy Seal who wrote it under the pseudonym Mark Owen (his real name is known). I remember being pissed off at the time, since I don’t believe Owen should have spoken up.  I assumed it probably contained secrets.  And as quiet professionals, members of our special forces have a code of conduct that prohibits them from taking credit or speaking about events and the things they do. And of course they should never write books.  More controversy over the actual events also ensued related to conflicting accounts of what actually happened.  I wasn’t ready to sift through any of the controversy at the time. We got OBL.  That was the important part.  The facts could wait, so the book sat on the shelf collecting dust for over a decade.

Now, with  all that time having elapsed since publication, I pulled the book down and read it cover to cover in just a few hours.  I cried genuine tears of redemption when I read about OBL being put to death by the assault team leader’s Heckler & Koch 417 on his third floor lair on that dark night in Pakistan on May 1st, 2011.  Owen claims he wrote the book to set the record straight and that the story of this mission belongs to all of us.  We the people(my words). The great Country of people forever harmed by Bin Laden’s horrific attacks on Sept 11th, 2001.  In hindsight, I believe Owen was absolutely right.  My tears are in agreement with him and I’m glad he went on the record with this story.  In doing so he took great risk and personal cost to his reputation, his integrity, and his security.  He knew that at the time he wrote it, but persisted, since to him the story was much larger than himself (his words), and history should judge his decision to be the right one.  Occasionally, words should be spoken.  Even the commanding General, McRaven, has written a book (several in fact) about his life in special forces.

With regard to Owen’s book, I noticed a lot of things in his story, but the most important fact is that the pages he has written for us contain no secrets--as I had presumed there would be.   In many books like this, secrets are in the press, they are out there. We neither confirm or deny them when we see them.  Sometimes they get redacted, sometimes they sneak in, or, if you happen to already have some insider knowledge, you can read between the lines.  Owens was meticulously aware of the line where secrets can be inadvertently revealed, and he was extremely cautious in what he wrote. In my opinion he never crossed a line.  Which means, for the record, Owen didn’t violate security, he only violated the code of being a quiet professional.  None of this makes it less of a read.   He tells the story of his life extremely well.  It all makes sense and is easy to read.  It’s conversational in tone, and when the mission starts, I found it impossible to put down.  

As I now reflect on the controversy surrounding this book, and read other articles and accounts in the press.  It appears Owen’s has portrayed the events of that night more accurately than most. Whether it was his personality or attention to detail, he was a scribe.  Most people do not have the capacity to write the story in their head as events unfurl. Natural writers have a journalistic mindset, facts and happenings, just write themselves into your memory as a sort of natural mnemonic.  To me, when a mindset such as Owen’s, tells the story from their memory, it is bound to be more accurate.  That’s not completely true, but on the whole they will tell a more accurate rendering.  Also, writers write.  It would have been impossible to keep a guy like Owens from writing down what was in his head.

My recommendation is to read this book.  Every American should close this chapter of our lives knowing OBL was capped.  It’s redemptive and healing. The book does not reveal secrets, despite the controversy.  The secrets of this operation existed ahead of the op.  That fact that we knew where OBL was, the importance to keep the planning under wraps until execution, and the politics surrounding going into Pakistan. All of which hit the light of day, the next day.  With regard to his early life, and training to be a SEAL, this material is all well known and continuously covered by books and movies alike.  To get his actual perspective as he worked through the training programs is important.  His perspectives and insights, while not universal, and unique by person, are not that uncommon and a general picture of the mental and physical stamina necessary to be a part of an elite fighting force. Also, the idea, that you can plan to be on the team to take out the most notorious criminal in the world, and that circumstance and luck (being in the right place at the right time) but also properly trained to be in that situation, is abundantly clear.  I would not have wanted to be the guy, in the right place, at the right time, when the Black Hawk rotors lost their lift and the pilot was forced to crash  into the compound…yet the mission succeeded. The planning and the training paid off.  Five stars for a book every American should read.  Deduct one star because SEAL’s shouldn’t write books.  But I’m glad he did.

Will Technology Save Us All

 When you say publicly that all religions are a myth in the same breath that you denounce agriculture as a fraud (history’s biggest fraud) and that all corporations are imaginary haven’t you just about kicked every sacred cow in the book?  According to Yuval Noah Harari, in his bestseller, “Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind”, there are many more of these lies we have told ourselves throughout history in order to grow from our insignificant beginnings as homo sapien hunter-gatherers in northern Africa into the technological god-like homo sapiens that now run corporate board rooms and scientific research laboratories enabling us to rule the planet.  He never concludes why it matters that we’ve deluded ourselves in order to collectively communicate--just that we have done so--and must now keep on keepin’ on if we want to hang around for the next stage of human evolution.

Let’s make something clear, this book is a best seller for a reason.  It is extremely well written and full of insight.  Harari has taken about 125 years of National Geographic Magazine and condensed it into 400 easy to read pages.  If you were wondering about the status of any anthropological research as of 2014, if you read this book, you are up to date.  The book would have sold alone for this history professor’s “Story of Us’ retelling.  But he goes further.  He poses the important questions in life and answers them with a remarkable call out to the capitalist form of mythology that now envelops and strives to assimilate the global economy. This theory alone, is fascinating, since we have all been a major part of it over the last 50 years...at least been witness to it.  But had he brought his other theories to a conclusion, and I believe he could have,  I would hold this book on the same high plateau as I hold books such as, “The Origin of the Conscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, by Julian Jaynes and “The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics” by Eric Beinhocker.  Both books ask critically important questions about human behavior and fearlessly take a stand on the answers.  Harari, perhaps to be ultra politically correct, does not seem to want to offend, as many college professor’s are loath to do these days. Thus the book suffers in the end.  He leaves us with questions about our future, the past, perhaps helping us know that we’ve got no other choice.  We are not, boats beating against the current, being drawn ceaselessly into the past, rather we are vessels, ready to be rewritten,  to spring forward, and to reshape the future.  This is what we  have been able to do, in a few scant hundred or so years versus the millennia of very little human progress, yet some how based on these myths that he defines as uniquely human.  A grey wolf does not, for instance, worship at the altar of Adele (my analogy not his).

I think, perhaps, after writing this book, he convinced himself, that his belief in the myth of it all, became less myth and more hard cold reality.  For instance, the myth forges the ability for two people who don’t know each other to know each other, since they don’t actually know each other.  But that’s simply not true. They do have a sense of common meaning and purpose such as obtaining tickets to the Adele tour in the US next year.  And when they see each other at the concert for the first time, as strangers, they will not be strangers.   They do know each other.  I’ve read his book.  Everyone who is reading this book, or reading this book review, doesn’t have to believe in the myth that is Harari’s theories on history for us to communicate.  We are doing so.  And it’s not mythical for me to pay Amazon electronically to have purchased the book.  I transferred something to them...and they returned value to me.  Unless I paid them with a fraudulent account which would be a lie,  these are not mythical things. They are simple constructs that are reality based. In their complexity, perhaps, they have taken on a mythical dimension, perhaps, but at their core, they are still reality. The credit bubble he spoke of, is however, a different story.  Which is why, in reality, we fear those bubbles.  We know they are not real...that doesn’t mean our entire system of commerce is a sham.   Perhaps, the word myth was lost in translation (He wrote the book in Hebrew) But I’m at a lost to find another word...because when it’s applied to religion, which many believe simply to be untrue, you can’t say myth there, and then cry myth about a corporation, and not mean the same thing.

This book had 5 star potential. well written, highly informative, and thought provoking.  I’ll deduct 1 star for not coming to the fearless conclusions  (right or wrong)  regarding the theory he laid out early on.  I’ll deduct a 2nd star for not hammering us as a species for making this planet our bitch.  Which so clearly we have done and so clearly not been rebuked for, by God, or by anything else (Who else is there?).  The rebuke is coming though.   Freeman Dyson, in his book, Disturbing the Universe, believes technology will save us when that rebuke becomes reality.  Harari seems to echo that theme.  I used to believe it...I have my doubts.

Conficker 101

Mark Bowden’s book, WORM, is the first to describe what’s really going on with the one’s and zero’s inside your computer as the battle for ownership of cyberspace, by those who wish to attack it (cyber criminals, cyber spies, cyber hoaxsters) and those who wish to preserve its safety and freedom of access (cyber developers, cyber capitalists, cyber protectors).  It should become a classic if it hasn’t already attained that status within cyber circles. 

Ever heard of Conficker?  It was all over the news in 2008.   It was that moment in time when we were all forced to begin understanding, or at least recognize, the difference between a computer virus or any other nefarious entities that we could collect in a public internet that could make our computers sick and frustrating to turn on.  Conficker was a worm...for many of us it was the first time we heard the term worm as well.  It was used to differentiate a bad thing happening to our computers from the litany of other bad things that could happen, such as spyware grabbing our email list, or malware, grabbing that list and sending links to porn sites to all of our friends (for the record that never happened to me). However, as it turns out, Conficker didn’t actually do bad things “to” your computer...as spyware and other apps aimed at disrupting our computer use had intended.  Conficker aimed to do bad things “with” your computer. The purpose of Conficker was to take control of your computer.  Conficker was designed to exploit a known vulnerability in the Windows operating system in order to gain root access to your computer so they could ask it to do anything they wanted at any time they wanted.  Once an external source has administrative privilege on your computer, even remotely, they can do whatever they want.  Certainly, they can do very bad things, like wipe your hard drive, steal your bank account numbers and passwords, or corrupt your system so it will never work again, but the aim of Conficker was to own an army of computers, that could be called into action by its one master. It was also designed so this control could be rented out, to another master.  So Conficker was designed to be extremely innocuous on your computer day to day.  You may not even know you were infected.  The intent was for it to just lie there in wait for one day when it’s owner called it into action. 

In general, a computer worm no more nefarious than any computer program running on your computer.  The difference is, in the wild, it is designed to move from computer to computer, gaining root access, and then phoning home to tell it’s master which computer it owns within the army of other infected computers it has taken over.  Then it continues to propagate to another computer, phone home, and lie in wait until commanded to do something.  That is Conficker.

In WORM Bowden brings to light the first group of cyber protectors who believe in using their computer knowledge for good to battle this Conficker worm.  He describes how this group, after discovering the Conficker attacks, banded together to isolate, dissect, and attempt to destroy Conficker, prior to being used for whatever nefarious purpose happened to be on their owner’s mind.  They did so without the support and approval of state governments, in particular that of the United States, where there was a denial that such cyber-attacks could be as invasive, widespread, and achievable as the Conficker infection appeared to be.   When realized, it proved to be a turning point, in how we view the power of the internet, how much we depend on it, how fragile it can be, and the possibility of what could happen if these fragilities led to a loss of control.  The security posture of the internet, the software and hardware that define it, and how the government, in particular our government, viewed cyber would change our policies to protect against, and for, the possibility of Conficker like attacks in the future.  

Bowden brings all of this to light in a well told tale of these superheroes of cyber.  These hacker good guys.  Most books about hackers talk about the dark side.  Bowden has given us tremendous knowledge to convince us that the good guys with a deep knowledge of computer science and computer security are not the same guys who are both attacking us and selling us anti-virus software at the same time.  In fact, he describes a case where that is exactly what was happening.  Nevertheless, we must believe that there are many forces for good out there, since the internet is of great, dare I say supreme, goodness for most of us on a day-to-day basis.  He gives us a glimpse of how impossibly large the internet already is, and that was back in 2008, and how hopelessly complex these problems of internet security actually can be.  The very fact the Conficker still exists in the wild, still infecting millions of computers, and still lying in wait until one day when it finds a hole in the defenses put in place to protect us from it, and begins it’s dirty deeds, should hurt your head.  It paints a picture of how vulnerable we really are and how fragile the one’s and zero’s that govern our daily lives can actually be.

I like this book.  I think it’s a must read for everyone who considers themselves to be in the business of cyber, for whatever reason.  Bowden did and tremendous job making this material available to everyone.  Not being a cyber professional himself, but immersing himself science and culture, you can see from page to page, his knowledge grows.  From the first pages where he is awkward and struggles to find the right words to express the technology, and even gets some of it wrong, or at least not exact, to the end where he has graduated from a master’s program in cyber and has full command and understanding of both his medium (as he is an expert storyteller) and now his subject matter.  All cyber professionals should have a few facts in their history jar about Conficker.  This is the most accessible treatment of the subject.  I’ll give WORM four stars.  It’s not a must read but it’s done well and will become should become a historical classic on the subject.

Wizard of EarthSea

 

Coming really late to the writing of  Ursula K. Le Guin, considering myself a geek, I was shocked to find an entire page of my youth left unwritten, or unread as it were.  That said, I’m much more of a science fiction geek than a fantasy geek.  Never cracking open the Lord of the Rings trilogy as for me, the writings of CS Lewis win  the debate between himself and Tokien, as to who is the real master of the craft.  Same can be said for new fantasy and anything resembling Harry Potter, not for me, thank you very much.  Yet, I wasn’t blind to King Aurthor, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round table. For me, writing less fantasy, something based on history, with a dragon, with a lot less sorcery was always more appealing.  Thus in  Helen Macdonald's great nonfiction work of  journey and discovery contained in “H is for Hawk”,  when she finds Merlin in a cabin that now belonged to T.H. White, all my scores with history and fantasy were settled once and for all.  I will not spoil that ending here.  But Merlin fans should go read that particular book.  

Yet here I go into Le Guin’s first writing for the adolescent mind, her first chapter on the events in EarthSea, where we are introduced in “A Wizard of EarthSea”, Ged, and a whole lot more creation as she has to paint the portrait of this new world, an archipelago of earth, adrift in both time, space, and a massive sea. EarthSea, afterall, is her Middle-earth...it is her Narnia.

But principally, she must introduce Ged and a new context for the understanding of wizardry in the world.  As  every village must have a representative of the offices of human endeavor,  a priest, a mayor, a wiseman, and an idiot,  so too must every village in EarthSea have a wizard. How did this wizard come to be?  How does one enter the world of wizardry as an occupation?  To Le Guin, wizardry must run in the family, and beyond being a sheep herder, Ged had learned early on that he had the gift of magic in him.  Along with an ability to herd goats.  He would have a choice to do something, or not, with that gift.  Lack of choice was not an option.  

Neither Tolkien nor Lewis dealt with the necessary details of creating schools of “witchcraft and wizardry” as seemingly more inclined to simply tell adventure stories where the magic was already present having been handed down from the very beginnings of ancient times. Rowling walzed straight through that open door and into the annals of literary history.  Yet here it is, 1969, and Le Guin was walking through that early door first.  It only  took another three decades for the lives of children in school to become more important than the far more adult matter of adventure...for wizards in highschool to be a thing.  How did we let our lives end up revolving so significantly around these little bastards, our kids, such that these school stories became more important than climbing Mt Everest, or traveling to the moon, for instance? Clearly we can trace the decline of western civilization to these early notions and shifting priorities that sprung from these and other crazy ideas fomented in the 60’s.

Significant other schools for misfit kids would follow but Rowling has since dominated the genre for the past two decades.  Le Guin was perhaps the first to ask why not a school for these special kids with various misfit  needs?  But since it was the 60’s, life’s experiences still didn’t manifest themselves in grades K thru 12 alone.  Experience and adventure was still a necessary part of the learning life skills both for the tradesman, and for the village sorcerer.  So Ged had to step into the world, go on a journey, make a few friends, and slay a few dragons, in order to learn life's lessons. Except I’ve overstepped my bounds with the word “slay”.  It seems Ged did not slay the primary dragon (he does dispatch a few of her smokey mouthed kids), rather, he sees fit to negotiate with the dragon, and based on the dragon’s promise, cast that particular threat out of the region he was sent to protect.  Even with my limited knowledge of fantasy lore  I’m quite certain dragon’s do not live by a code of honor whereby they would enter into such a binding promise with a wizard straight out of high school, particularly after that wizard had just killed a few of it’s progeny.  This book says the dragon kept it’s promise so I’ll have to live with it.

It is doubtful I will venture further into this series of fantasy.  It’s not my cup of tea.  I will say Le Guin’s writing is strong and seriously poetic.  With strong statements of prose, of perhaps the language of EarthSea, which are metered and measured.  Perhaps listening to this on audio would be a better presentational format, almost, as if she writes to be heard.  For instance, “Haven, harbor, peace, safety, all that was behind. They had turned away. They went now in a way in which all events were perilous, and no acts were meaningless”.  This is good stuff, but alas, not sufficient for me to read further.  I got it.  She’s good.  She was ahead of her time.  I’m glad I’ve  finally caught up...only fifty years later...

The Kill Chain

A new book making the rounds inside the Beltway is entitled, “The Kill Chain, Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare”. Written by Christian Brose, a former speech writer for Condoleezza Rice, a defense policy advisor to Senator McCain, and now the chief strategist at Andruil, Brose creates a rally cry to reform the military industrial complex into something that resembles Silicon Valley.  Specifically, Brose believes that our military has atrophied over the past two decades and if we fight a war with China, for example, we would lose.  The only way to reestablish our global dominance and prevail over China is to fix our Department of Defense (DoD) through the adaptation of the high-tech innovation and the speed of product delivery demonstrated by many successful commercial companies in Northern California. Brose spent a good deal of time with Senator McCain and shared conversations with him in this book.  Those discussions reflect McCain’s love of country and desire for the US not to fall behind our near peer adversaries.  Beyond that, as a beltway insider myself, I’ve spent many of the same years inside the halls of the Pentagon and see things a bit differently.

While perhaps unknown to many Americans, the colorful phrase used by David Ockmanek to describe to Brose what happens if we engage in a war with China was a common phrase used inside the Pentagon. That phrase, “We get our ass handed to us”, never gets old.  The outcome of a direct engagement with the Chinese has been dubious for some time despite what Brose may say.  The scenarios in which we lose are purposefully designed to do analysis of force structure.  Not necessarily to develop a plan to actually fight them.  The question is one of how big a military force should we procure?  Balancing dollars vs quasi-realistic scenarios is at the heart of the force structure analysis business.   If we are considering an assault on China, something beyond deterring their aggression in the South China Sea, or deflecting an attack on Taiwan, I have not read any of that in a current, or past for that matter, National Defense Strategy. Thus, Brose believes either 1) our force must be large enough to provide a winning hit on the Chinese to deter their aggression or 2) our force must change with advanced technology to provide the same deterrence value.

Brose believes, albeit notionally, if we are not doing either of those two things we are in a losing proposition against China.  Brose completely misses that fact that deterrence against a near peer will never emerge though a conventional engagement alone.  Rather, deterrence comes from all levers of National power including military, diplomatic, and economic.  Specifically related to defense, Brose misses the role of a nuclear deterrent strategy--similar to the one we engaged in for 50 years to defeat the USSR during the Cold War—as a deterrent of near peer aggression.  You can’t have a defensive strategy for the US without consideration of all levels of power…nuclear weapons in particular. Since the book is absent any mention of nuclear policy, I’ll suspend reality and pretend that that option doesn’t exist in our world and address what he is really after.  And that is technological change in our defense department to win with high tech weapons connected to a network, or Military Internet of Things (MIOT) since what he is really after is modeling the DoD after the tech companies in Silicon Valley that has brought us the real, Internet of Things (IOT).  In his mind this creates a construct that enables us to fight our next war from our iPhones, that sounds simplistic, but he said that.

This is a similar argument first put forth at the advent of the internet.  Brose talks about Andy Marshal and the Office of Net Assessment.  Marshall bought us the term Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).  A true RMA comes along every few generations and it’s important to see them when they are upon us.   However, the true architect of fighting wars in the information age were the visionaries behind the term Network Centric Warfare (NCW) and specifically the Navy’s foray into their Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC).  I wish he would have studied network warfare before writing this book. Those architects, although noble in pursuit of their goals, fell short well short of their vision…Adm Cembroski it’s chief proponent specifically failed in delivering his vision.  Brose would have done better had he studied Navy CEC before writing about networks and winning wars with them.  Specifically, the Navy’s pursuit of a very specific kill chain, known as Joint Integrated Fire Control, (JIFC).  This kill chain lies at heart of the Navy CEC capability.  Brose only talks about kill chains in a general sense.  He never actually defines a single kill chain in this book.  Yet there are so many kill chains in the DoD.  To not describe a single kill chain is a major flaw in his work.   You learn kill chains as a part of your warfighter 101 when you enter the military. And you train to whatever part of the kill chain to which you happen to be a member. 

Here’s a kill chain.  An anti-ship cruise missile is launched from a Chinese vessel at a US Navy ship.  The E-2D Hawkeye flying in the skies above the fleet is the first to detect the missile skimming across the ocean. The Spy-1 radar on the Aegis Cruiser cannot see the missile yet because it is too far off and too low over the horizon. If defensive F-18 are in the air and close to the area in question they can be vectored by the Hawkeye to take a look and perhaps engage.  As the missile breaks the horizon, the Aegis could fire a fast missile to shoot it down.  As the missile closes on the ship for its final impact, the Navy vessel targeted can try to shoot it down with its Phalanx CWIS system. (CWIS stand for Close in Weapons System). Three chances to shoot the missile down in a layered defense.  Moving beyond the Navy both the Air Force and the Army have their own kill chain to deal with incoming missile threats.  Everyone involved in these kill chains train for these engagements over and over again. The idea to integrate (network) them at a weapons control level might seem like a good idea on the surface, but it is a distraction and a pure red herring.  At the detail level, it’s not the way to conduct these engagements.  Three things make this an impossible endeavor.  1) Physically the systems are constrained by physics from cooperating during these engagements.  2)  Tactically the defense is layered for increased kill effectiveness and 3) the engagement zones are constrained to prevent fratricide. Sharing situational awareness between systems is a good goal but sharing fire control quality data is unnecessary and is the unobtainium of which Brose speaks broadly but never truly defines in this way.  

There are many kill chains depending on the mission. Integrating kill chains is thought to be the nirvana of warfighting, but it’s not that easy.  Why, because of a thing called physics.  Physics in the kinetic realm and physics in the non-kinetic realm.  Newton’s laws (along with Bernoulli and Naiver-Stokes) govern the conservation of energy for kinetic kill chains on the surface and in the air of our planet.  Kepler’s laws govern what we can do from orbit.  And Shannon’s Information Theory, along with the math of Nyquist, rule the realm of information. Why?  Because at the heart of our digital world, believed to be composed of ones and zeros, is a physical world made up entirely of energy and conductors of energy (metals and silicon metalloids).  The ones and zeroes are an imaginary construct for humans to understand in order to communicate with the physics of our hardware-based overlords.  Everyone knows about Newton and Kepler, most have not heard of Shannon and/or Nyquist. But to understand how networks can be used to fight within a kill chain, one must also be a student of them all first…and then write the software.   

There are so many more kill chains, I’ll describe one more, a very simple one.  Dropping a bomb on a target.  First the bunker has to be targeted.  It has to be on a map, there has to be an image of it with measured coordinately inside some type of reference system. In the old days a bombardier would look through a Norton bomb scope with the instrument correcting for speed and heading of the aircraft.  Today, with Global Position System (GPS) guided munitions, the bomb does all the work.  With a set of guidance fins on the back, flying the falling bomb down to it’s target by receiving it’s position, of all things, from the GPS, while closing on it’s targeted coordinates.  That app you are using to drive your car is part of the military targeting kill chain. A military system built to kill people and break things with uncanny effectiveness.  GPS ushered in smart weapons and was indeed a Revolution in Military Affairs.  Imagery, coordinates, and a constellation of GPS satellites seemingly is all you need.  Oh, it’s important that the bomb be within it’s kinematic limits, which means it actually has to be released on it’s target, somewhere in the kinematic vicinity of it’s target.  Something has to bring it there.  We call all of the material necessary to get that bomb into the vicinity of the target, force structure.  It’s not a network.  It’s not software.  It’s hardware.  And a lot of it.  The earth is a big place.

Brose’s vision of an MIOT is simply not based in reality. It has nothing to do with big prime defense contractors not being able to evolve, innovate, or code software in an agile fashion.  Fighting wars on this planet must be a function of distance and mass first and then information and speed. They are both important but we haven’t solved the mass and distance problem yet.   During the Cold War we would have lost a conventional fight in Russia not because we didn’t have information or speed, but because 50,000 Russian main battle tanks would have been streaming through the Fulda Gap.  They would have outnumbered our forces combined with the forces of our NATO allies in Europe, 5 to 1.  We are not going to attack 50,000 main battle tanks with swarms of battery charged quadcopters all equipped with megapixel cameras anytime soon. Nor will those quadcopters make it across the South China Sea. In the end we beat Russia economically while we held them at bay with an ever-evolving strategic nuclear policy.   We will lose against China, not because we can’t close a kill chain.   We are a long way from our adversary, those kill chains are extremely hard to close without huge investment in weapons and infrastructure we simply can’t afford and don’t need to buy regardless.  We will lose to China and Russia period if we can’t keep up with them politically and economically…as it turns out these are definitely better places the information age, and Silicon Valley can help.  Can somebody get me a chip for a GPU for heaven’s sake?

Another pet peeve of mine, comes early in his book.  That is this tired and inane notion that because the F-22 and the F-35 can’t communicate with each other, that’s a failure of technology, and a failure of our country's ability to field systems through the huge bureaucracy of an acquisition process known as JCIDS or the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.    Brose has written a book called “The Kill Chain”.  Clearly, he knows that the F-22 is our premier Air-to-Air Fighter designed to fight in the Air-to-Air kill chain.  Big radar, big missiles, and the best flying machine ever conceived and flown.  The F-35 was designed for a different mission entirely.  The F-35 was designed to fight principally as an Air-to-Ground fighter first.  It drops bombs to take out IADS and kill tanks.  And, oh by the way, the two aircraft can indeed communicate when necessary.  Through a thing called radio, or more specifically, JTIDS or Link-16.   The two aircraft are being maligned for not being able to communicate through their shared data link.  Something designed very specifically for a coordinated multi-ship attack of F-35’s to work together during a specific mission, without revealing themselves, but still be able to coordinate lethal effects, locally.  Not globally.  Why would a kinetic attack, happening 1000’s of miles away, need to report (or share) engagement level data back home?  They were not designed to fight together in this way.  Also, they were designed 20 years apart...the data link on the F-35 is far superior to the data link on the F-22 in most ways. 

By far, the best Chapter is Brose’s book, is his chapter on the politics within Congress and the decisions being made within the DoD.  He’s experience at this level of government shines through.  Brose is right, we do have a problem in figuring out what to do…the service MAJCOMs along with the COCOMS figure out what we need.  Sure they fight among themselves and OSD straightens them out.  But then the politics get involved and decisions are made based on everything but the military strategy. It’s the politics.  It’s not the cost, the lack of vision or the ability to invent new warfighting technology…that happens on a daily basis…much of it cannot be shared.  As we know our adversaries are looking through every window they can to see into and steal what they can carry out.  That way they don’t have to  invent it themselves. That bleeding of information has to stop.  It’s not adopting the concepts of Silicon Valley that will save us.  It’s getting our politicians too corporate on a strategy for what’s best for our nation.  Granted, we took two decades off to fight a different war, the Global War on Terrorism, and we did take our eye off the great threats from Russia and China.  But we are not losing.  We just are not winning.  But conventional force structure alone, with better networks, and faster software, does not help us win either. It only distracts us.

The DoD has not lost its pace on innovation and technology...we still excel in materials science, energy, propulsion, aircraft & spacecraft design, stealth, electronic warfare, and a few other things.  We are also pretty good in cyber.  Our issue isn’t smarts or lack of technology or the greedy primes, it’s simply the number of people we have. We are exceeded by China in pure numbers alone.  To combat their numbers, we need more engineers.  Yes software programmers should be among them…but we need good, solid, motivated engineers, scientists, mathematics, analysts, and researchers.  We need American’s committed to the defense of our country to turn away from the glitter and high pay of Silicon Valley in favor of the hard stuff.  You didn’t learn calculus in college to write a computer application that delivers pizza. You learned calculus to become a physicist, a mathematician, or a mechanical, electrical, or aerospace engineer.  These are the fine American’s in our Military Industrial Complex.  And yes we are losing them to high paying software jobs in Silicon Valley.  But that’s not why we should change our military strategy.

Since Brose is a good writer and tells compelling stories, and was on the front line in the State Department and the Senate, I’ll start with 3 stars.  Add one star because I love John McCain.  I’ll deduct one star for the F-35/F-22 flaw. I’ll deduct another star because Brose does not define a single Kill Chain in a book called “The Kill Chain”.  Two stars only, for this book from deep inside the beltway despite its glowing reviews from some people who should know better (Stavridis and Petraeus).