Monthly Archives: August 2007

Intelligence – Virtual Earth image reveals Trident sub's secret propeller

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Navy Times – This month, a photograph appeared on the Internet of the propeller on an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at Trident Submarine Base in Bangor. A key to the submarine’s ability to deploy and remain undetected, propeller designs have been kept under wraps for years, literally. When out of the water, the propellers typically are draped with tarps. The propeller image appeared on Microsoft’s mapping tool, Virtual Earth.
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Fourth Generation Warfare – The Coming Urban Terror

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City Journal – John Robb nicely summarizes his work on Global Guerrilas in this essay where he notes that for the first time in history, a majority of the worldís population is living in urban environments. Cities – efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital – are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.
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Intelligence – Overhauling Intelligence

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Foreign Affairs – Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.
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Information Warfare – Arab Media and the Battle for Ideas

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First Monday – David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, authors of Netwar, write:

As the information age deepens, a globe-circling realm of the mind is being created – the ìnoosphereî that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noˆpolitik (or noˆspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authorsí views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non-state actors – unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates – are using the Internet and other new media to practice noˆpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins – the essence of noˆpolitik – is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas
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US Navy – Stealth Goes to Sea

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Aviation Week – Northrop Grumman is starting to reveal details of its X-47B unmanned combat aircraft demonstrator. Despite protestations by company officials that they only wanted to talk about the $635.8 million, 6-year project to demonstrate launches and recoveries at sea, they soon turned to the operational potential of its X-47B unmanned combat aircraft design.
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