MODERN WARFARE
A French View of Counterinsurgency
by
Roger Trinquier
A French View of Counterinsurgency
by
Roger Trinquier
UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE
Saturday, December 9, 2023
Sunday, November 5, 2023
fear or desire
• Jean de La Fontaine’s aphorism “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire”
https://web.archive.org/web/20081201191332/http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08110
https://web.archive.org/web/20081201191332/http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/08110
raison d'être
‡raison d'être
‡rai·son d'ê·tre
[Fr., reason of state]
a diplomatic or political reason
raison d'être
rai·son d'ê·tre
[Fr.] reason for being; justification for existence
‡rai·son d'ê·tre
[Fr., reason of state]
a diplomatic or political reason
raison d'être
rai·son d'ê·tre
[Fr.] reason for being; justification for existence
television is the national drug
Reed E. Hundt, You say you want a revolution, 2000 [ ]
p.47
I said, “Certainly. I know how important television is to the country.”
“It's important to everyone,” he said.
“It's the national drug,” I said, even after having promised Blair I would not go for the glib.
p.59
Then Ted lowered his voice and said slowly, sadly, like a television newscaster reporting on a funeral, “I can't give the money away now. It's gone. You took it away. You killed Al's foundation when you lowered cable rates.”
Then he said gently, “I don't blame you. You did what Congress asked you to do. Cost the environment a billion dollars, though.”
I had no words. “What are you trying to do at that FCC?” he asked. “What are you trying to accomplish?”
“We're focusing on education,” I said lamely, and thought myself that I had hardly justified cable rate regulation with that answer.
“Well,” he said, “here's my advice: your dreams need to be worth your time.”
p.61
“You should throw this away,” he said, “and talk to them about what you care about.”
I told Blair a true story, as he directed the car to circle the building. After college I got a job as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia. I taught 7th-grade social studies. On average, in the three years at my school a child would fall two years behind in reading skills. Only half of my 7th graders would graduate from junior high school, and only half of them from high school. The best way was physically to get out: to be permitted to enroll in one of the city's magnet schools.
I had three students out of 150 who started 7th-grade reading well enough to give them a chance to admitted to a magnet school in 8th-grade. Every Saturday for several months I tutored them on how to pass the entrance exam. The day of the exam came. All my students failed the test.
In my government jobs, I wanted to make sure that schoolchildren today have a better ways to escape poverty. I wanted teachers to have better tools than I did. I wanted to make recompense for my own failings as a teacher.
Blair said, “Right now everyone thinks you're just trying to deliver a kind of politically acceptable package on behalf of Al and the Democratic Congress. But this story about the kids and how you feel, that gets across to people. You have to make your job be about yourself.”
“Because then it's worth my time,” I said, thinking of Ted Turner.
p.62
But, as he wished, I told the story of my teaching experience to the curious crowd. The applause had a quality of sympathy I had never heard before. It appeared that as Mr. Chairman, I was obliged to put at stake not only my career but also myself. Public office required not thick skin, but no skin at all.
p.63
British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully.
Winston Churchill
p.42
Even in the United States, a 5th of children grow up in poverty.
(Hundt, Reed E., 1948─, You say you want a revolution : a story of information age politics / Reed E. Hundt, 1. united states. telecommunications act of 1996., 2. telecommunication policy──united states., 3. information superhighway──government policy──united states., 4. internet (computer network)──government policy──united states., HE7781.H88 2000, 384.3'3'0973──dc21, 2000, ) <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
p.47
I said, “Certainly. I know how important television is to the country.”
“It's important to everyone,” he said.
“It's the national drug,” I said, even after having promised Blair I would not go for the glib.
p.59
Then Ted lowered his voice and said slowly, sadly, like a television newscaster reporting on a funeral, “I can't give the money away now. It's gone. You took it away. You killed Al's foundation when you lowered cable rates.”
Then he said gently, “I don't blame you. You did what Congress asked you to do. Cost the environment a billion dollars, though.”
I had no words. “What are you trying to do at that FCC?” he asked. “What are you trying to accomplish?”
“We're focusing on education,” I said lamely, and thought myself that I had hardly justified cable rate regulation with that answer.
“Well,” he said, “here's my advice: your dreams need to be worth your time.”
p.61
“You should throw this away,” he said, “and talk to them about what you care about.”
I told Blair a true story, as he directed the car to circle the building. After college I got a job as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia. I taught 7th-grade social studies. On average, in the three years at my school a child would fall two years behind in reading skills. Only half of my 7th graders would graduate from junior high school, and only half of them from high school. The best way was physically to get out: to be permitted to enroll in one of the city's magnet schools.
I had three students out of 150 who started 7th-grade reading well enough to give them a chance to admitted to a magnet school in 8th-grade. Every Saturday for several months I tutored them on how to pass the entrance exam. The day of the exam came. All my students failed the test.
In my government jobs, I wanted to make sure that schoolchildren today have a better ways to escape poverty. I wanted teachers to have better tools than I did. I wanted to make recompense for my own failings as a teacher.
Blair said, “Right now everyone thinks you're just trying to deliver a kind of politically acceptable package on behalf of Al and the Democratic Congress. But this story about the kids and how you feel, that gets across to people. You have to make your job be about yourself.”
“Because then it's worth my time,” I said, thinking of Ted Turner.
p.62
But, as he wished, I told the story of my teaching experience to the curious crowd. The applause had a quality of sympathy I had never heard before. It appeared that as Mr. Chairman, I was obliged to put at stake not only my career but also myself. Public office required not thick skin, but no skin at all.
p.63
British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully.
Winston Churchill
p.42
Even in the United States, a 5th of children grow up in poverty.
(Hundt, Reed E., 1948─, You say you want a revolution : a story of information age politics / Reed E. Hundt, 1. united states. telecommunications act of 1996., 2. telecommunication policy──united states., 3. information superhighway──government policy──united states., 4. internet (computer network)──government policy──united states., HE7781.H88 2000, 384.3'3'0973──dc21, 2000, ) <-------------------------------------------------------------------------->
has warfare changed
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U_QgOntjMSRnpzaDwYgkeZy8Xkqqx-AE/view?usp=drive_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U_QgOntjMSRnpzaDwYgkeZy8Xkqqx-AE/
source:
first search attempt
https://www.google.com/search?q=warfare+ausa+comparing+apple+and+orange
second search using the exact title of work
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Has+Warfare+Changed%3F+Sorting+Apples+from+Oranges
select second link on the result page
<< copy & paste TEXT second option search result >>
Association of the United States Army
https://www.ausa.org › sites › default › files › L...
by JM Dubik · 2002 · Cited by 18 — Has Warfare Changed? Sorting Apples from Oranges by. James M. Dubik. An Institute of Land Warfare Publication. The Landpower Essay series is
https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-02-3-Has-Warfare-Changed-Sorting-Apples-From-Oranges.pdf
Aeschylus
Wisdom comes by suffering slowly, drop by drop. –Aeschylus27
As soon as they tell me it’s limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me it’s ‘surgical,’ I head for the bunker. -Colin Powell15
What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?
-Madeleine Albright.16
The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. -Clausewitz19
I never believed the Third Army was a center of gravity. Body bags coming home from Kosovo didn’t bother Milosevic or the rest of the Serb leadership elite. Only when we turned out the lights in Belgrade did we get their attention. - Michael Short25
The Clash Between Principle and Practice The political object, as the original motive of the war, should be the standard for determining both the aim
of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made. - Clausewitz8
8 Howard, Michael and Paret, Peter, eds, Carl von Clausewitz: On War, p.81, Princeton University Press, New
Jersey, 1976.
It was a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence, and favored by that fortune which loves the brave.
Secretary of State John Hay on the Spanish-American War of 18981
source:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a432768.pdf
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY
NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE
Kosovo: Redefining Victory in an Era of Limited War
Nancy McEldowney/Class of 2000
Core Course 5602
Seminar I
Faculty Seminar Leader: Colonel John Nelsen
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Dave Tretler
As soon as they tell me it’s limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me it’s ‘surgical,’ I head for the bunker. -Colin Powell15
What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?
-Madeleine Albright.16
The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. -Clausewitz19
I never believed the Third Army was a center of gravity. Body bags coming home from Kosovo didn’t bother Milosevic or the rest of the Serb leadership elite. Only when we turned out the lights in Belgrade did we get their attention. - Michael Short25
The Clash Between Principle and Practice The political object, as the original motive of the war, should be the standard for determining both the aim
of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made. - Clausewitz8
8 Howard, Michael and Paret, Peter, eds, Carl von Clausewitz: On War, p.81, Princeton University Press, New
Jersey, 1976.
It was a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence, and favored by that fortune which loves the brave.
Secretary of State John Hay on the Spanish-American War of 18981
source:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a432768.pdf
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY
NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE
Kosovo: Redefining Victory in an Era of Limited War
Nancy McEldowney/Class of 2000
Core Course 5602
Seminar I
Faculty Seminar Leader: Colonel John Nelsen
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Dave Tretler
fruit flies
<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
0:48:54
Yeah, but I am only studying fruit flies.
And I'm interested in basic research, not applications.
And he said, “Look, that's too easy.”
He said, “Science, you have to regard science as a big lake, and scientists put their information in, raise the level of the lake. But as you add information, it mixed up with everything else. And somebody may draw out an idea over here and apply it ... and misapply it. But you can't say that that's not somehow connected to the work that you've contributed, because you've contributed to a ‘body of knowledge’ and you draw out of that body of knowledge.”;
0:49:45, ── David Suzuki, DVD, Force of Nature the David Suzuki movie, 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sy%C4%81dv%C4%81da
These seven propositions also known as saptabhangi are:[53]
syād-asti – "in some ways it is"
syād-nāsti - "in some ways it is not"
syād-asti-nāsti - "in some ways it is and it is not"
syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is and it is indescribable"
syād-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is not and it is indescribable"
syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable"
syād-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is indescribable"
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Evelyn Fox Keller, A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock, 1983
p.59
According to Creighton, Morgan later confessed that he had known about Stern's work a the time. But, as he explained (about a year after his intervention), he was also aware of the fact that, even though Creighton and McClintock had begun the summer before, it would have been a simple matter for Stern to overtake them. With Drosophila [fruit flies], one need not wait for entire growing season to learn the results of genetic crosses; one can get a new generation every ten days. Creighton recalls Morgan's saying, “I thought it was about time that corn got a chance to beat Drosophila!”
(A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock./ Evelyn Fox Keller., 1. McClintock, Barbara, 1902- ., 2. geneticists──united states──biography., QH439.2.M38K44 1983, 575.1'092'4, 10th anniversary edition, 1983, )
____________________________________
Clayton M. Christensen, Innovator's dilemma, 1997, 2000 [ ]
p.3
When I began my search for an answer to the puzzle of why the best firms can fail, a friend offered some sage advice. "Those who study genetics avoid studying humans," he noted. "Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see."
(Innovator's dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, copyright © 1997, 2000, 658.4 Christen, p.3)
____________________________________
Oral history of Shang-Yi chiang
interviewed by: Douglas Fairbairn
recorded on March 15, 2022
computer history museum (CHM)
"When we develop one node, basically you have some learning cycles. First, you do some simulation. And you have some idea, then you run wafers to prove that. So, you run a group of wafers according to simulation and you have some splits. The wafer runs through the fab, they come out and you measure them, you analyze them, and you try to improve and you run this again. This again, you run. So, this is learning cycle."
"It takes about six learning cycle, roughly, to complete one generation."
"My R&D wafer in the fab run much faster than yours, because my R&D engineer works three shifts and you only work one shift. So, your R&D wafer move eight hours a day, my work/move 24-hours a day. So, my wafers go three times faster, even if you are twice smarter than me, I still beat you up."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
____________________________________
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
Chiang: Intel, Motorola, National, HP. And they're all my customers.
Fairbairn: Right
Chiang: And the board member they sent to Sematech for many companies happen to be the person also in charge of the supply chain. Well, they are my major customer, but on the Sematech board we kind of sit together, we can discuss things on equal base. Not like my customer. <laughs> And so, in that platform we are able to-- some time we are able to more freely exchange some information. So, one time at a dinner, they asked me, they said that, "We all take two years to develop one generation, how come you guys can do it in one or one-and-a-half year?" And they asked if some of your customer transfer technology to you or what not? And I told him, "No," I told him that, "That's not true." I think he probably implied we steal technology from customer, the way he talk. And I say, "I'll tell you why." I said that, "When we develop one node, basically you have some learning cycles. First, you do some simulation. And you have some idea, then you run wafers to prove that. So, you run a group of wafers according to simulation and you have some splits. The wafer runs through the fab, they come out and you measure them, you analyze them, and you try to improve and you run this again. This again, you run. So, this is learning cycle." At that time, "It takes about six learning cycle, roughly, to complete one generation." Of course, you had some short loops and not just one. I said that, "My R&D wafer in the fab run much faster than yours, because my R&D engineer works three shifts and you only work one shift. So, your R&D wafer move eight hours a day, my work/move 24-hours a day. So, my wafers go three times faster, even if you are twice smarter than me, I still beat you up." <laughter>
Fairbairn: That's what everybody says. Faster learning cycle, right?
Chiang: Faster learning cycle. And three to one is kind of a little bit exaggerated, because it's usually night shift it's not very effective. Just the idea. But because I knew at HP, TSMC R&D wafer did move much, much faster than HP. But HP is not a good benchmark.
Fairbairn: Not a good bench-- yeah.
Chiang: And then they ask me, "How can you make your R&D engineer work night shift?" And I kind of joke with them -- and I can share with you the real reason what I think. But at that time, I told them, I said, "In Taiwan, we all have to serve the military." I said, "I did. When you're in service, you-- especially in the basic training-- you take a duty for the security guard."
Fairbairn: Mm hm, stand watch.
Chiang: Stand watch, right. "It may be my turn from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. Then the guy would wake me up at 1:45. Then I got up, I change my clothes, I got my helmet, got my rifle, then I went over at 2 o'clock, and 2:45 I wake up another guy. And so, all my engineers have been through that. So, I tell him to, you know, it's your turn to do that! <laughs> Don’t complain!" <laughter> And what interesting at that time, the board member from Motorola, I just remember, his name was Bill Walker-- I don't know if you know him or not?
Fairbairn: No, I don't think I know him.
Chiang: Bill Walker. He's a big, big guy. Later on, I found he used to be a Marine. I knew that later.
Fairbairn: Yeah.
Chiang: Because he was one of my very large customers, I usually visit him once a year.
Fairbairn: Mm hm.
Chiang: I went over with our sales manager and the two of us usually went to his office. And he had one of his Supply Chain Manager - four of us sit-down. Usually Bill would give us a lecture telling us what we did wrong and how bad we behaved. I took notes. The meeting lasts an hour. Next time I visit him, they took me to a different room. I found it a little bit different. When they opened the door, there were about 20 people around the table. He was in charge of R&D and the manufacturing for Motorola Semiconductor Worldwide. He said, "These are my R&D and the fab managers in the entire world. I got them together. I want you to tell the same story to them." <laughter> So, that was what I always told them but they didn’t listen.
Fairbairn: So, what was the real answer about <laughter>?
Chiang: The real answer is I, honestly, I just share with you, I think the culture. Asians are more hungry, because we had a tougher life. So, to make money is more important to us. People are willing to sacrifice their own privacy, their private life in order to have financial security.
Fairbairn: That's what you did. You moved to Taiwan without your wife or your family, right?
Chiang: Right. Just to make a living.
Fairbairn: And work 22 hours a day.
Chiang: <laughs> But not later. So, I firmly believe this is one of the really important reasons why TSMC succeeded. It's culture. If equipment went down, because equipment depreciation cost was so high, you really want to run your equipment 24 hours a day. In United States, if equipment went down, wait until next morning. The people come in at eight o'clock and probably go to fix it, nine o'clock. Yeah. But if at two o'clock in the morning, we just called the equipment engineer, "You come right away," he won't complain. And his wife won't complain. And that's the way it is.
Fairbairn: Right.
Chiang: And that help a lot.
source:
Oral history of Shang-Yi chiang
interviewed by: Douglas Fairbairn
recorded on March 15, 2022
computer history museum (CHM)
Shang-yi Chiang oral history.pdf
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
____________________________________
of course, chimpanzee is closer to human than mice (mouse);
however, generationally chimpanzee is also closer to human;
mice on the other hand is a mammal, like human is a mammal;
and mice has the added benefit of have a shorter life cycle, comparably closer to the fruit flies, than human or chimpanzee;
with mice, because of its short life span, giving it faster new generation, enabling more learning cycle;
the question then becomes, what are we studying ...;
what biological model are we trying to learn about;
you want a biological model that is as close to the ... as possible, with a short life span, to enable faster learning cycle;
bacteria, cyanobacteria, virus, mold, yeast, fruit flies, mice, chicken, rabbit, fish, zebra fish, ...
here is what I would say to the chemical company, the chemical industry, the fossil fuel, the herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, ...cide, ..., to artifical food coloring, ...
how would you feel having your chemical plant or an atomic nuclear power plant next to where your live, in your back yard, next to where your children go to pre-school, up wind from a hospital to where your wife will give birth, ...
basically, unless you make it personal for them, I do not think most people get it; it is other people problem; ...
the pregnant mother test
the baby test
____________________________________
____________________________________
0:48:54
Yeah, but I am only studying fruit flies.
And I'm interested in basic research, not applications.
And he said, “Look, that's too easy.”
He said, “Science, you have to regard science as a big lake, and scientists put their information in, raise the level of the lake. But as you add information, it mixed up with everything else. And somebody may draw out an idea over here and apply it ... and misapply it. But you can't say that that's not somehow connected to the work that you've contributed, because you've contributed to a ‘body of knowledge’ and you draw out of that body of knowledge.”;
0:49:45, ── David Suzuki, DVD, Force of Nature the David Suzuki movie, 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sy%C4%81dv%C4%81da
These seven propositions also known as saptabhangi are:[53]
syād-asti – "in some ways it is"
syād-nāsti - "in some ways it is not"
syād-asti-nāsti - "in some ways it is and it is not"
syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is and it is indescribable"
syād-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is not and it is indescribable"
syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable"
syād-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is indescribable"
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Evelyn Fox Keller, A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock, 1983
p.59
According to Creighton, Morgan later confessed that he had known about Stern's work a the time. But, as he explained (about a year after his intervention), he was also aware of the fact that, even though Creighton and McClintock had begun the summer before, it would have been a simple matter for Stern to overtake them. With Drosophila [fruit flies], one need not wait for entire growing season to learn the results of genetic crosses; one can get a new generation every ten days. Creighton recalls Morgan's saying, “I thought it was about time that corn got a chance to beat Drosophila!”
(A feeling for the organism : the life and work of Barbara McClintock./ Evelyn Fox Keller., 1. McClintock, Barbara, 1902- ., 2. geneticists──united states──biography., QH439.2.M38K44 1983, 575.1'092'4, 10th anniversary edition, 1983, )
____________________________________
Clayton M. Christensen, Innovator's dilemma, 1997, 2000 [ ]
p.3
When I began my search for an answer to the puzzle of why the best firms can fail, a friend offered some sage advice. "Those who study genetics avoid studying humans," he noted. "Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see."
(Innovator's dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, copyright © 1997, 2000, 658.4 Christen, p.3)
____________________________________
Oral history of Shang-Yi chiang
interviewed by: Douglas Fairbairn
recorded on March 15, 2022
computer history museum (CHM)
"When we develop one node, basically you have some learning cycles. First, you do some simulation. And you have some idea, then you run wafers to prove that. So, you run a group of wafers according to simulation and you have some splits. The wafer runs through the fab, they come out and you measure them, you analyze them, and you try to improve and you run this again. This again, you run. So, this is learning cycle."
"It takes about six learning cycle, roughly, to complete one generation."
"My R&D wafer in the fab run much faster than yours, because my R&D engineer works three shifts and you only work one shift. So, your R&D wafer move eight hours a day, my work/move 24-hours a day. So, my wafers go three times faster, even if you are twice smarter than me, I still beat you up."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
____________________________________
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
Chiang: Intel, Motorola, National, HP. And they're all my customers.
Fairbairn: Right
Chiang: And the board member they sent to Sematech for many companies happen to be the person also in charge of the supply chain. Well, they are my major customer, but on the Sematech board we kind of sit together, we can discuss things on equal base. Not like my customer. <laughs> And so, in that platform we are able to-- some time we are able to more freely exchange some information. So, one time at a dinner, they asked me, they said that, "We all take two years to develop one generation, how come you guys can do it in one or one-and-a-half year?" And they asked if some of your customer transfer technology to you or what not? And I told him, "No," I told him that, "That's not true." I think he probably implied we steal technology from customer, the way he talk. And I say, "I'll tell you why." I said that, "When we develop one node, basically you have some learning cycles. First, you do some simulation. And you have some idea, then you run wafers to prove that. So, you run a group of wafers according to simulation and you have some splits. The wafer runs through the fab, they come out and you measure them, you analyze them, and you try to improve and you run this again. This again, you run. So, this is learning cycle." At that time, "It takes about six learning cycle, roughly, to complete one generation." Of course, you had some short loops and not just one. I said that, "My R&D wafer in the fab run much faster than yours, because my R&D engineer works three shifts and you only work one shift. So, your R&D wafer move eight hours a day, my work/move 24-hours a day. So, my wafers go three times faster, even if you are twice smarter than me, I still beat you up." <laughter>
Fairbairn: That's what everybody says. Faster learning cycle, right?
Chiang: Faster learning cycle. And three to one is kind of a little bit exaggerated, because it's usually night shift it's not very effective. Just the idea. But because I knew at HP, TSMC R&D wafer did move much, much faster than HP. But HP is not a good benchmark.
Fairbairn: Not a good bench-- yeah.
Chiang: And then they ask me, "How can you make your R&D engineer work night shift?" And I kind of joke with them -- and I can share with you the real reason what I think. But at that time, I told them, I said, "In Taiwan, we all have to serve the military." I said, "I did. When you're in service, you-- especially in the basic training-- you take a duty for the security guard."
Fairbairn: Mm hm, stand watch.
Chiang: Stand watch, right. "It may be my turn from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. Then the guy would wake me up at 1:45. Then I got up, I change my clothes, I got my helmet, got my rifle, then I went over at 2 o'clock, and 2:45 I wake up another guy. And so, all my engineers have been through that. So, I tell him to, you know, it's your turn to do that! <laughs> Don’t complain!" <laughter> And what interesting at that time, the board member from Motorola, I just remember, his name was Bill Walker-- I don't know if you know him or not?
Fairbairn: No, I don't think I know him.
Chiang: Bill Walker. He's a big, big guy. Later on, I found he used to be a Marine. I knew that later.
Fairbairn: Yeah.
Chiang: Because he was one of my very large customers, I usually visit him once a year.
Fairbairn: Mm hm.
Chiang: I went over with our sales manager and the two of us usually went to his office. And he had one of his Supply Chain Manager - four of us sit-down. Usually Bill would give us a lecture telling us what we did wrong and how bad we behaved. I took notes. The meeting lasts an hour. Next time I visit him, they took me to a different room. I found it a little bit different. When they opened the door, there were about 20 people around the table. He was in charge of R&D and the manufacturing for Motorola Semiconductor Worldwide. He said, "These are my R&D and the fab managers in the entire world. I got them together. I want you to tell the same story to them." <laughter> So, that was what I always told them but they didn’t listen.
Fairbairn: So, what was the real answer about <laughter>?
Chiang: The real answer is I, honestly, I just share with you, I think the culture. Asians are more hungry, because we had a tougher life. So, to make money is more important to us. People are willing to sacrifice their own privacy, their private life in order to have financial security.
Fairbairn: That's what you did. You moved to Taiwan without your wife or your family, right?
Chiang: Right. Just to make a living.
Fairbairn: And work 22 hours a day.
Chiang: <laughs> But not later. So, I firmly believe this is one of the really important reasons why TSMC succeeded. It's culture. If equipment went down, because equipment depreciation cost was so high, you really want to run your equipment 24 hours a day. In United States, if equipment went down, wait until next morning. The people come in at eight o'clock and probably go to fix it, nine o'clock. Yeah. But if at two o'clock in the morning, we just called the equipment engineer, "You come right away," he won't complain. And his wife won't complain. And that's the way it is.
Fairbairn: Right.
Chiang: And that help a lot.
source:
Oral history of Shang-Yi chiang
interviewed by: Douglas Fairbairn
recorded on March 15, 2022
computer history museum (CHM)
Shang-yi Chiang oral history.pdf
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2022/07/102792671-05-01-acc.pdf
____________________________________
of course, chimpanzee is closer to human than mice (mouse);
however, generationally chimpanzee is also closer to human;
mice on the other hand is a mammal, like human is a mammal;
and mice has the added benefit of have a shorter life cycle, comparably closer to the fruit flies, than human or chimpanzee;
with mice, because of its short life span, giving it faster new generation, enabling more learning cycle;
the question then becomes, what are we studying ...;
what biological model are we trying to learn about;
you want a biological model that is as close to the ... as possible, with a short life span, to enable faster learning cycle;
bacteria, cyanobacteria, virus, mold, yeast, fruit flies, mice, chicken, rabbit, fish, zebra fish, ...
here is what I would say to the chemical company, the chemical industry, the fossil fuel, the herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, ...cide, ..., to artifical food coloring, ...
how would you feel having your chemical plant or an atomic nuclear power plant next to where your live, in your back yard, next to where your children go to pre-school, up wind from a hospital to where your wife will give birth, ...
basically, unless you make it personal for them, I do not think most people get it; it is other people problem; ...
the pregnant mother test
the baby test
____________________________________
____________________________________
have they done it before
____________________________________
── Michael V. Hayden: when we went to them for things nobody had done yet, we found that at best they weren't much better or faster than we were.
── And that was true even with a team that included such defense giants as SAIC, Boeing, CSC, AT&T, and Booz Allen Hamilton. We were also trying to do too much, too quickly.
── We would have been better advised to pick our spots and work incrementally, trusting to spiral development to eventually get us to where we wanted to be.
── (Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror, 2016, pp.20-21)
Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror, 2016
p.20
We found that when we went to industry for things they already knew how to do, we got impressive results. When we went to them for things nobody had done yet, we found that at best they weren't much better or faster than we were. And that was true even with a team that included such defense giants as SAIC, Boeing, CSC, AT&T, and Booz Allen Hamilton.
We were also trying to do too much, too quickly. Trailblazer comprised multiple moon shots.
p.21
We would have been better advised to pick our spots and work incrementally, trusting to spiral development to eventually get us to where we wanted to be.
(Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror / Michael V. Hayden, New York : Penguin Press, 2016, (hardback) (ebook), intelligence service──united states. | national security──united states. | united states. central intelligence agency. | united states. national security agency. | biography & autobiography / political. | political science / political freedom & security / intelligence. | history / united states / 21st century., JK468.I6 H39 2016 (print), JK468.I6 (ebook), 327.1273──dc23, 2016, )
____________________________________
── Michael V. Hayden: when we went to them for things nobody had done yet, we found that at best they weren't much better or faster than we were.
── And that was true even with a team that included such defense giants as SAIC, Boeing, CSC, AT&T, and Booz Allen Hamilton. We were also trying to do too much, too quickly.
── We would have been better advised to pick our spots and work incrementally, trusting to spiral development to eventually get us to where we wanted to be.
── (Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror, 2016, pp.20-21)
Michael V. Hayden, Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror, 2016
p.20
We found that when we went to industry for things they already knew how to do, we got impressive results. When we went to them for things nobody had done yet, we found that at best they weren't much better or faster than we were. And that was true even with a team that included such defense giants as SAIC, Boeing, CSC, AT&T, and Booz Allen Hamilton.
We were also trying to do too much, too quickly. Trailblazer comprised multiple moon shots.
p.21
We would have been better advised to pick our spots and work incrementally, trusting to spiral development to eventually get us to where we wanted to be.
(Playing to the edge : American intelligence in the age of terror / Michael V. Hayden, New York : Penguin Press, 2016, (hardback) (ebook), intelligence service──united states. | national security──united states. | united states. central intelligence agency. | united states. national security agency. | biography & autobiography / political. | political science / political freedom & security / intelligence. | history / united states / 21st century., JK468.I6 H39 2016 (print), JK468.I6 (ebook), 327.1273──dc23, 2016, )
____________________________________
old conflict (decision)
____________________________________
“The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over
and over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
p.289
It is the old conflict between the concepts of the open system and the closed, between the forces of centralized order and those of dispersed variety. The antagonists assume new forms, the general change, but essentially the same battles are fought over and over again.
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
“It is the old conflict between the concepts of the
open system and the closed, between the forces of
centralized order and those of dispersed variety.
The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over and
over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
• “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally
unchanging. What has happened before will perforce [ of necessity ·
inevitably · unavoidably ] happen again.”
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
What has happened before will perforce happen again,
he said.”;
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows;
Ranee Panjabi, History of Espionage, Memorial University;
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
____________________________________
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The starfish and the spider, 2006 [ ]
p.42
We'll see this pattern repeat itself across different sectors and in different industries. We call this radical swing “the accordion principle”. Over time, industries swing from being decentralized to centralized to decentralized and back again. In response to overcentralized industries or institutions, people rebel and create open starfish systems.
p.42
At the extreme of decentralization, we encounter a gray zone where a very loose collection of people have a surprising amount of power.
(Brafman, Ori, The starfish and the spider : the unstoppable power of leaderless organization / Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom., 1. decentralization in management., 2. organization behavior., 3. success in business., 2006, )
____________________________________
Jerome Bruner, The culture of education, 1996 [ ]
p.122 “hermeneutic circle”
What is particularly interesting about a story as a structure is the two-way street that it travels between its parts and the whole. The events recounted in a story take their meaning from the story as a whole. But the story as a whole is something that is constructed from its parts. This part/whole tail-chasing bears the formidable name “hermeneutic circle”, and it is what causes stories to be subject to interpretation, not to explanation. You cannot explain a story; all you can do is give it variant interpretations. You can explain falling bodies by reference to a theory of gravity. But you can only interpret what might have happened to Sir Isaac Newton when the legendary apple fell on his head in the orchard. So we say that scientific theories or logical proof are judged by means of verification or test--or more accurately, by their verifiability or testability--whereas stories are judged on the basis of their verisimilitude or “lifelikeness.”
p.126
The process of science making is narrative.
(Bruner, Jerome S. (Jerome Seymour), The culture of education / Jerome Bruner. 1. education psychology. , 2. social psychology. , 3. educational anthropology. , 4. education--philosophy. , 5. discourse analysis. , 1996, )
____________________________________
(
http://www.ehow.com/
info_8699554_shakespeares-seven-stages-life.html
)
Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Life
By Tallulah Philange,
eHow Contributor,
last updated July 06, 2011
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
――Jaques, Shakespeare's comedy play ‘As You Like It,’ in Act II, Scene 7, written around Gregorian calendar 1600 by William Shakespeare, first published in 1623.
( The plot partly involves a duke who has been overthrown from power. In banishment, he's accompanied by the melancholy Jaques. Jaques delivers the speech that begins with "all the world's a stage," and outlines the seven stages of a person's life, from the helpless days of infancy to adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and aging and death. )
Stage 1: Infant
“At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.”
Stage 2: Schoolboy
“And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail, unwillingly to school.”
Stage 3: Lover
“And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad, made to his mistress' eyebrow.”
Stage 4: Soldier
“Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth.”
Stage 5: Justice
“And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; and so he plays his part.”
Stage 6: Advanced Age
“The sixth age shifts, into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide, for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”
Stage 7: Dementia and Approaching Death
“Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Significance of Speech
The line "all the world's a stage" is one of the most quoted of Shakespeare. The "stage" referenced has nuanced meanings. First, there are the literal stages of life, from infancy to death. Then, there is the metaphor that mankind is merely performing a predetermined role as part of a grander production. Our roles, Shakespeare seems to be writing, are largely not of our own making. Mankind follows a similar path, and no matter how we act our parts -- our lives -- we all end up the same: in "mere oblivion." The speech is a dark moment is what otherwise is considered a comedic play, and contrasts the optimism of other characters with the defeatist, dour Jaques.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
____________________________________
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the future, 1974 [ ]
p.3
Like Rome most earlier societies that rose subsequently fell, at least partway. Not too long ago Spain was the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Later both France and England won and lost this distinctive position. Before Spain's dominance Syria, Egypt, Greece, and many other societies traveled through history like shooting stars, appearing on one horizon and disappearing on the other. Survival--let alone “thrival”--of a society is not assured by any historical law. If anything, history seems to indicate that the fall of an elevated society is inevitable. But the future is not completely contained in the past; much of it has yet to be written.
p.4
Sir Charles P. Snow identified it in his famous lecture on The Two Culture: “During all human history until this century, the rate of social change has been very slow. So slow, that it could pass unnoticed in one person's lifetime. That is no longer so. The rate of change has increased so much that our imagination can't keep up.”
pp.4-5
Sir Goeffrey Vickers, the eminent British social philosopher, put it another way: “The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed, with a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings us nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost.”
p.7
A person's ability to manage his or his society's affairs depends more on his understanding of, and attitudes toward, the world that contains him than on his problem-solving methods. Put another way, his success depends more on his view of the world and the philosophy he lives by than it does on his science and technology. The reasons for this are neither complex nor obscure.
p.8
The problems we select for solution and the way we formulate them depends more on our philosophy and world view than on our science and technology. How we go about solving them obviously depends on our science and technology, but our ability to use them effectively also depends on our philosophy and world view. These, in turn, depend on the concepts and ideas we use and how we use them to organize our perceptions of the world. <skip the last sentence of the paragraph>
( Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-, Redesigning the future., 1. united states--social conditions--1960-., 2. social problems., 3. social change., 4. system theory., 1974, )
(Redesigning the future : a systems approach to societal problems, Russell L. Ackoff, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, p.3 )
____________________________________
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
pp.9-10
But this book will focus on chronicling the turning points of the 20th century''s information landscape: those particular, decisive moments when a medium opens or closes. The pattern is distinctive. Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention my inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology make less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers'dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul like Vail or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individual expression and technical innovation--control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
____________________________________
“If you watch the curve of science and everything we
know, it shoots up like a rocket. We're on this
rocket and we're going perfectly vertical into the
stars. But the emotional intelligence of humankind
is equally if not more important than our intellectual
intelligence. We're just as emotionally illiterate
as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is
completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and
the vertical are getting farther and farther apart.
And as these things grow apart, there's going to be
some kind of consequence of that.”;
── George Lucas, a 1997 interview with Kevin Kelly,
published in Kevin Kelly's book, p.196,
What technology wants, 2010.
David DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite, 2011
p.113
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
--Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
pp.137-138
Professor Laurie Santos is one of the leading primatologists in the country. As the director of the Yale University CapLab (aka, the Comparative Cognitive Laboratory), she has developed an understanding of capuchin monkey social systems that is challenging many of our long-held assumptions about monkey and human distinctions. At times, she explains, watching the capuchins is just like watching human soap opera (without the cheesy dialogue). Monkeys display jealousy, grief, worry, joy, and a range of other emotions that we used to think were exclusive to humans. They also cheat on their partners, steal, and alienate others, just like humans do. As it turns out, the dynamics of monkey society are not unlike our own--in some ways, they are startlingly similar.
What is not the same, Santos points out, is how we and our capuchin counsins navigate our way through our respective social landscapes. The reason for this disparity is that natural evolution and cultural evolution move at entirely different speeds. Santos comments: “Culture moves much faster than natural selection; too fast for natural selection to ever catch us up biologically.”1
Another way to state that observation is that our social infrastructure is far more complex than natural selection could prepare us for. When we observe monkeys, we see a species exhibiting emotional undercurrents similar to our own and addressing them with basic skills that fit the need. If an alien race were to observe us, on the other hand, they would see a species wrestling to manage social complexity that is frequently over our heads, threatening to drown us on any given day.
What this means is that our brains are in many ways at odds with our social environments. Happy brains are protective, predictive, and conservative--not the best fit for human societies that place high value on unpredictability, speed, and consumption. Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves, and our social culture is ours to manage no matter how profound the difficulties--after all, we are the crafters of our societies.
p.282
1. Laurie Santos, PhD, in discussion with the author [David DiSalvo], January 2011.
(DiSalvo, David, 1970-, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite / by David DiSalvo., 1. happiness., 2. logic., 3. desire., 4. neurosciences., 152.42 DiSalvo, 2011, )
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Dan Ariely, Predictably irrational, 2008 [ ]
p.166
One of my colleagues at Duke University, Ralph Keeney, recently noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obsesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviors.10 Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace.
10. Ralph Keeney, “Personal Decisions Are the Leading Cause of Death”, Operation Research (2008).
p.166
I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. (For an overweight movie lover, the key might be to enjoy watching film while walking on the treadmill.) The trick is to find the right behavioral antidate for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome--and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.
( Dan Ariely, predictably irrational : the hidden forces that shape our decisions, revised and expanded edition, 153.83 Ariely, (pkb.), 2010, )
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.92
Five hundred thousand plus three hundred thousand: That was getting close to a million, in the very real contingency of Chinese entry. But even without the Chinese involvement, figures in the neighborhood of a million had been mentioned earlier that summer. According to David Halberstam, the president asked General Wheeler in June what he thought it would take to do the job. Wheeler replied: “It all depends on what your definition of the job is, Mr. President. If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.” In a discussion with Clark Clifford [one of Johnson's closest personal consultants, Clifford later replaced McNamara as SecDef, secretary of defense] and the president later that month, Wheeler used the figures 750,000 and six or seven years.
p.185
There was the fast turnover in personnel and the lack of institutional memory at any level.
p.168
But about a year later, when I was back in the States, I saw a long article in the New York Times Magazine describing the difficulties of pacifying a VC district, Rach Kien. At first I thought it was reporting the operation I had been in. But it was about a different battalion, 8 months later. All the problems and experiences sounded very familiar. The article said that Rach Kein had always been a Vietcong district up till then, and this was the first time American troops had tried to operate there.
pp.185─186
; an operation eight months later in the same paddies that was not even aware American troops had ever visited them before. AS Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this was for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”
p.251
What I read in 1969 was that an exactly comparable written accord had been violated eight years earlier, in 1946, by the French.
p.251
Ho Chi Minh's somber plea to Jean Sainteny in September 1946 in France, at the close of his abortive negotiations: “Don't let me leave this way; arm me against those who seek to surpass me.” (In Vietnam, Ho's colleagues and rivals were bitterly criticizing his concessions in negotiations that he had made in the interests of avoiding a settlement by war.) “You will not regret it .... If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours. And in the end it is you that will tire.”
p.253
Ironically, as Vu Van Thai pointed out to me at RAND, it was just at this time that the French effort at reconquest had become, in Thai's term, “Sisyphen.”
When Communist forces reached the border of Vietnam in late 1949, the border became open to Chinese communist aid to the Viet minh independence movement.
As Thai put it, “From that time on it became impossible for the French to defeat the Vietminh forces.”
The French had become disheartened (realistic) about their prospects about the same time and wanted out.
•─‘’“”
p.253
But at the same time,
it became politically “impossible” for a u.s. administration to allow the French to be defeated or to withdraw (since the united states was not anxious to send its own troops).
p.276
read the Pentagon papers.
p.347
I said that I thought strongly that he should, at least to read the summaries, which were only a few single-spaced pages at the start of each volume. He could have an assistant read the texts and pick out passages that seemed especially pertinent. But the summaries alone added up to about sixty pages. “They make a very readable story. You really should make the effort.”
“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”
p.284
(That was how the French had sounded to us in 1964: “What we couldn't win, you can't win.” But the French had been right!)
p.291
analyses that presented our Vietnam policy not as an aberration or misadventure but as being in line with unacknowledged u.s. objectives and covert activities elsewhere in the third world.
pp.19─20
Pham Van Dong
Then he had said that the prospect for the United States and its friends in South Vietnam was “sans issue”: no way out, a dead end. Now, in the aftermath of the American raids, he said that the United States had found “it is necessary to carry the war to the North in order to find a way out of the impassed ... in the south.”
He had gotten the message. (It remained a secret from the American electorate, and from Congress, for the next 8 months.) A wider war on the way.
p.193
I soon got a crucial commentary on this Kennedy paradox, as I thought of it, from his brother.
pp.193─196
I was glad to have the chance to tell him what I had seen and what I thought should be done, but I also wanted to ask him about the period I was investigating for the McNamara study, the Kennedy decision making in 1961.
I told him briefly why I had picked that year to study and how I was now more puzzled than ever by the combination of decisions I found the president had made. In rejecting ground troops and a formal commitment to victory, he had been rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials. With hindsight, that didn't look foolish; it was the advice that looked bad. Yet he did proceed to deepen our involvement, in the face of a total consensus among his advisers that without the measures he was rejecting, in fact without adopting them immediately, our effort were bound to fail.
I told Bobby it was hard to make sense out of that combination of decisions. Did he remember how it came out that way? I felt uneasy about describing the problem that way to the president's brother, but I knew it might be my only opportunity ever to get an answer, and his manner with me encouraged me to take the chance.
He thought about what I'd put to him for a moment and then said, “We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined nver to send ground combat units to Vietnam.” His brother was convinced, Bobby said, that if he did that, we'd be in the same spot as the French. The Vietnamese on our side would leave the fighting to the United States, and it would become our war against nationalism and self-determination, whites against Asians. That was a fight we couldn't win, any more than the French.
pp.195─196
But what wasn't clear to me was how Kennedy could have been so prescient in 1961, or where he would have gotten such a strong personal commitment, as to draw an absolute line against American ground combat in Vietnam. Bobby had not said that his brother had already decided in 1961 to withdraw from Vietnam; he had simply told me that JFK preferred and intended to do that rather than to send ground troops, if it came to the point where those seemed the only two alternatives to imminent military defeat. I hadn't heard any American ── among those reluctant to get out of Vietnam, for cold war reasons ── advancing that precise point of view before 1964 (though some, notably George Ball, didn't want to send even advisers). Obviously none of Kennedy's most senior advisers shared it. I also hadn't thought of JFK as having idiosyncratic opinions, let alone a conviction like that, about Indochina. I asked, a little impudently, “What made him so smart?”
Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. “Because we were there!” He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. “We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”
pp.196─197
<start of block quote>
Kennedy told Taylor about his own experiences in Vietnam, which he had visited for a day in 1951 as a young congressman on an around-the-world tour. He had begun that day in Saigon with the commander of the 250,000 French troops fighting Viet Minh guerrillas. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had assured him that his soldiers could not lose to these natives. He had ended the evening on top of the Caravelle Hotel with a young American consular officer named Edmund Gullion. The sky around the city flashed with the usual nighttime artillery and mortar bombardment by the Viet Minh.
“What have you learned here?” Kennedy asked the diplomat.
“That in 20 years there will be no more colonies”, Gullion had said. “We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. THe home front is lost. The same thing would happen us.”
<end of block quote>
Ask the right person the right question, and you could get the picture pretty fast.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.134
Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned the fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time. There were recent Popular Force outposts. WE had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any. But basically these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets. They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of the U.S. aid. Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam.
But next to one of them was a pill box of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes. The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French. I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France. We drove by several of those. Most were from the 1946─54 war by France to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours. But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam.
In the midsts of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens. I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World war II. They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war. Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones. I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years. When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of that Tran Ngoc Chau had once said to me: “You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese though it took us a thousand years.”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
“The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over
and over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
p.289
It is the old conflict between the concepts of the open system and the closed, between the forces of centralized order and those of dispersed variety. The antagonists assume new forms, the general change, but essentially the same battles are fought over and over again.
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
“It is the old conflict between the concepts of the
open system and the closed, between the forces of
centralized order and those of dispersed variety.
The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over and
over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
• “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally
unchanging. What has happened before will perforce [ of necessity ·
inevitably · unavoidably ] happen again.”
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
What has happened before will perforce happen again,
he said.”;
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows;
Ranee Panjabi, History of Espionage, Memorial University;
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
____________________________________
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The starfish and the spider, 2006 [ ]
p.42
We'll see this pattern repeat itself across different sectors and in different industries. We call this radical swing “the accordion principle”. Over time, industries swing from being decentralized to centralized to decentralized and back again. In response to overcentralized industries or institutions, people rebel and create open starfish systems.
p.42
At the extreme of decentralization, we encounter a gray zone where a very loose collection of people have a surprising amount of power.
(Brafman, Ori, The starfish and the spider : the unstoppable power of leaderless organization / Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom., 1. decentralization in management., 2. organization behavior., 3. success in business., 2006, )
____________________________________
Jerome Bruner, The culture of education, 1996 [ ]
p.122 “hermeneutic circle”
What is particularly interesting about a story as a structure is the two-way street that it travels between its parts and the whole. The events recounted in a story take their meaning from the story as a whole. But the story as a whole is something that is constructed from its parts. This part/whole tail-chasing bears the formidable name “hermeneutic circle”, and it is what causes stories to be subject to interpretation, not to explanation. You cannot explain a story; all you can do is give it variant interpretations. You can explain falling bodies by reference to a theory of gravity. But you can only interpret what might have happened to Sir Isaac Newton when the legendary apple fell on his head in the orchard. So we say that scientific theories or logical proof are judged by means of verification or test--or more accurately, by their verifiability or testability--whereas stories are judged on the basis of their verisimilitude or “lifelikeness.”
p.126
The process of science making is narrative.
(Bruner, Jerome S. (Jerome Seymour), The culture of education / Jerome Bruner. 1. education psychology. , 2. social psychology. , 3. educational anthropology. , 4. education--philosophy. , 5. discourse analysis. , 1996, )
____________________________________
(
http://www.ehow.com/
info_8699554_shakespeares-seven-stages-life.html
)
Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Life
By Tallulah Philange,
eHow Contributor,
last updated July 06, 2011
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
――Jaques, Shakespeare's comedy play ‘As You Like It,’ in Act II, Scene 7, written around Gregorian calendar 1600 by William Shakespeare, first published in 1623.
( The plot partly involves a duke who has been overthrown from power. In banishment, he's accompanied by the melancholy Jaques. Jaques delivers the speech that begins with "all the world's a stage," and outlines the seven stages of a person's life, from the helpless days of infancy to adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and aging and death. )
Stage 1: Infant
“At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.”
Stage 2: Schoolboy
“And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail, unwillingly to school.”
Stage 3: Lover
“And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad, made to his mistress' eyebrow.”
Stage 4: Soldier
“Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth.”
Stage 5: Justice
“And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; and so he plays his part.”
Stage 6: Advanced Age
“The sixth age shifts, into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide, for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”
Stage 7: Dementia and Approaching Death
“Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Significance of Speech
The line "all the world's a stage" is one of the most quoted of Shakespeare. The "stage" referenced has nuanced meanings. First, there are the literal stages of life, from infancy to death. Then, there is the metaphor that mankind is merely performing a predetermined role as part of a grander production. Our roles, Shakespeare seems to be writing, are largely not of our own making. Mankind follows a similar path, and no matter how we act our parts -- our lives -- we all end up the same: in "mere oblivion." The speech is a dark moment is what otherwise is considered a comedic play, and contrasts the optimism of other characters with the defeatist, dour Jaques.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
____________________________________
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the future, 1974 [ ]
p.3
Like Rome most earlier societies that rose subsequently fell, at least partway. Not too long ago Spain was the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Later both France and England won and lost this distinctive position. Before Spain's dominance Syria, Egypt, Greece, and many other societies traveled through history like shooting stars, appearing on one horizon and disappearing on the other. Survival--let alone “thrival”--of a society is not assured by any historical law. If anything, history seems to indicate that the fall of an elevated society is inevitable. But the future is not completely contained in the past; much of it has yet to be written.
p.4
Sir Charles P. Snow identified it in his famous lecture on The Two Culture: “During all human history until this century, the rate of social change has been very slow. So slow, that it could pass unnoticed in one person's lifetime. That is no longer so. The rate of change has increased so much that our imagination can't keep up.”
pp.4-5
Sir Goeffrey Vickers, the eminent British social philosopher, put it another way: “The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed, with a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings us nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost.”
p.7
A person's ability to manage his or his society's affairs depends more on his understanding of, and attitudes toward, the world that contains him than on his problem-solving methods. Put another way, his success depends more on his view of the world and the philosophy he lives by than it does on his science and technology. The reasons for this are neither complex nor obscure.
p.8
The problems we select for solution and the way we formulate them depends more on our philosophy and world view than on our science and technology. How we go about solving them obviously depends on our science and technology, but our ability to use them effectively also depends on our philosophy and world view. These, in turn, depend on the concepts and ideas we use and how we use them to organize our perceptions of the world. <skip the last sentence of the paragraph>
( Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-, Redesigning the future., 1. united states--social conditions--1960-., 2. social problems., 3. social change., 4. system theory., 1974, )
(Redesigning the future : a systems approach to societal problems, Russell L. Ackoff, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, p.3 )
____________________________________
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
pp.9-10
But this book will focus on chronicling the turning points of the 20th century''s information landscape: those particular, decisive moments when a medium opens or closes. The pattern is distinctive. Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention my inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology make less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers'dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul like Vail or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individual expression and technical innovation--control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
____________________________________
“If you watch the curve of science and everything we
know, it shoots up like a rocket. We're on this
rocket and we're going perfectly vertical into the
stars. But the emotional intelligence of humankind
is equally if not more important than our intellectual
intelligence. We're just as emotionally illiterate
as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is
completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and
the vertical are getting farther and farther apart.
And as these things grow apart, there's going to be
some kind of consequence of that.”;
── George Lucas, a 1997 interview with Kevin Kelly,
published in Kevin Kelly's book, p.196,
What technology wants, 2010.
David DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite, 2011
p.113
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
--Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
pp.137-138
Professor Laurie Santos is one of the leading primatologists in the country. As the director of the Yale University CapLab (aka, the Comparative Cognitive Laboratory), she has developed an understanding of capuchin monkey social systems that is challenging many of our long-held assumptions about monkey and human distinctions. At times, she explains, watching the capuchins is just like watching human soap opera (without the cheesy dialogue). Monkeys display jealousy, grief, worry, joy, and a range of other emotions that we used to think were exclusive to humans. They also cheat on their partners, steal, and alienate others, just like humans do. As it turns out, the dynamics of monkey society are not unlike our own--in some ways, they are startlingly similar.
What is not the same, Santos points out, is how we and our capuchin counsins navigate our way through our respective social landscapes. The reason for this disparity is that natural evolution and cultural evolution move at entirely different speeds. Santos comments: “Culture moves much faster than natural selection; too fast for natural selection to ever catch us up biologically.”1
Another way to state that observation is that our social infrastructure is far more complex than natural selection could prepare us for. When we observe monkeys, we see a species exhibiting emotional undercurrents similar to our own and addressing them with basic skills that fit the need. If an alien race were to observe us, on the other hand, they would see a species wrestling to manage social complexity that is frequently over our heads, threatening to drown us on any given day.
What this means is that our brains are in many ways at odds with our social environments. Happy brains are protective, predictive, and conservative--not the best fit for human societies that place high value on unpredictability, speed, and consumption. Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves, and our social culture is ours to manage no matter how profound the difficulties--after all, we are the crafters of our societies.
p.282
1. Laurie Santos, PhD, in discussion with the author [David DiSalvo], January 2011.
(DiSalvo, David, 1970-, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite / by David DiSalvo., 1. happiness., 2. logic., 3. desire., 4. neurosciences., 152.42 DiSalvo, 2011, )
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Dan Ariely, Predictably irrational, 2008 [ ]
p.166
One of my colleagues at Duke University, Ralph Keeney, recently noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obsesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviors.10 Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace.
10. Ralph Keeney, “Personal Decisions Are the Leading Cause of Death”, Operation Research (2008).
p.166
I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. (For an overweight movie lover, the key might be to enjoy watching film while walking on the treadmill.) The trick is to find the right behavioral antidate for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome--and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.
( Dan Ariely, predictably irrational : the hidden forces that shape our decisions, revised and expanded edition, 153.83 Ariely, (pkb.), 2010, )
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.92
Five hundred thousand plus three hundred thousand: That was getting close to a million, in the very real contingency of Chinese entry. But even without the Chinese involvement, figures in the neighborhood of a million had been mentioned earlier that summer. According to David Halberstam, the president asked General Wheeler in June what he thought it would take to do the job. Wheeler replied: “It all depends on what your definition of the job is, Mr. President. If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.” In a discussion with Clark Clifford [one of Johnson's closest personal consultants, Clifford later replaced McNamara as SecDef, secretary of defense] and the president later that month, Wheeler used the figures 750,000 and six or seven years.
p.185
There was the fast turnover in personnel and the lack of institutional memory at any level.
p.168
But about a year later, when I was back in the States, I saw a long article in the New York Times Magazine describing the difficulties of pacifying a VC district, Rach Kien. At first I thought it was reporting the operation I had been in. But it was about a different battalion, 8 months later. All the problems and experiences sounded very familiar. The article said that Rach Kein had always been a Vietcong district up till then, and this was the first time American troops had tried to operate there.
pp.185─186
; an operation eight months later in the same paddies that was not even aware American troops had ever visited them before. AS Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this was for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”
p.251
What I read in 1969 was that an exactly comparable written accord had been violated eight years earlier, in 1946, by the French.
p.251
Ho Chi Minh's somber plea to Jean Sainteny in September 1946 in France, at the close of his abortive negotiations: “Don't let me leave this way; arm me against those who seek to surpass me.” (In Vietnam, Ho's colleagues and rivals were bitterly criticizing his concessions in negotiations that he had made in the interests of avoiding a settlement by war.) “You will not regret it .... If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours. And in the end it is you that will tire.”
p.253
Ironically, as Vu Van Thai pointed out to me at RAND, it was just at this time that the French effort at reconquest had become, in Thai's term, “Sisyphen.”
When Communist forces reached the border of Vietnam in late 1949, the border became open to Chinese communist aid to the Viet minh independence movement.
As Thai put it, “From that time on it became impossible for the French to defeat the Vietminh forces.”
The French had become disheartened (realistic) about their prospects about the same time and wanted out.
•─‘’“”
p.253
But at the same time,
it became politically “impossible” for a u.s. administration to allow the French to be defeated or to withdraw (since the united states was not anxious to send its own troops).
p.276
read the Pentagon papers.
p.347
I said that I thought strongly that he should, at least to read the summaries, which were only a few single-spaced pages at the start of each volume. He could have an assistant read the texts and pick out passages that seemed especially pertinent. But the summaries alone added up to about sixty pages. “They make a very readable story. You really should make the effort.”
“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”
p.284
(That was how the French had sounded to us in 1964: “What we couldn't win, you can't win.” But the French had been right!)
p.291
analyses that presented our Vietnam policy not as an aberration or misadventure but as being in line with unacknowledged u.s. objectives and covert activities elsewhere in the third world.
pp.19─20
Pham Van Dong
Then he had said that the prospect for the United States and its friends in South Vietnam was “sans issue”: no way out, a dead end. Now, in the aftermath of the American raids, he said that the United States had found “it is necessary to carry the war to the North in order to find a way out of the impassed ... in the south.”
He had gotten the message. (It remained a secret from the American electorate, and from Congress, for the next 8 months.) A wider war on the way.
p.193
I soon got a crucial commentary on this Kennedy paradox, as I thought of it, from his brother.
pp.193─196
I was glad to have the chance to tell him what I had seen and what I thought should be done, but I also wanted to ask him about the period I was investigating for the McNamara study, the Kennedy decision making in 1961.
I told him briefly why I had picked that year to study and how I was now more puzzled than ever by the combination of decisions I found the president had made. In rejecting ground troops and a formal commitment to victory, he had been rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials. With hindsight, that didn't look foolish; it was the advice that looked bad. Yet he did proceed to deepen our involvement, in the face of a total consensus among his advisers that without the measures he was rejecting, in fact without adopting them immediately, our effort were bound to fail.
I told Bobby it was hard to make sense out of that combination of decisions. Did he remember how it came out that way? I felt uneasy about describing the problem that way to the president's brother, but I knew it might be my only opportunity ever to get an answer, and his manner with me encouraged me to take the chance.
He thought about what I'd put to him for a moment and then said, “We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined nver to send ground combat units to Vietnam.” His brother was convinced, Bobby said, that if he did that, we'd be in the same spot as the French. The Vietnamese on our side would leave the fighting to the United States, and it would become our war against nationalism and self-determination, whites against Asians. That was a fight we couldn't win, any more than the French.
pp.195─196
But what wasn't clear to me was how Kennedy could have been so prescient in 1961, or where he would have gotten such a strong personal commitment, as to draw an absolute line against American ground combat in Vietnam. Bobby had not said that his brother had already decided in 1961 to withdraw from Vietnam; he had simply told me that JFK preferred and intended to do that rather than to send ground troops, if it came to the point where those seemed the only two alternatives to imminent military defeat. I hadn't heard any American ── among those reluctant to get out of Vietnam, for cold war reasons ── advancing that precise point of view before 1964 (though some, notably George Ball, didn't want to send even advisers). Obviously none of Kennedy's most senior advisers shared it. I also hadn't thought of JFK as having idiosyncratic opinions, let alone a conviction like that, about Indochina. I asked, a little impudently, “What made him so smart?”
Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. “Because we were there!” He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. “We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”
pp.196─197
<start of block quote>
Kennedy told Taylor about his own experiences in Vietnam, which he had visited for a day in 1951 as a young congressman on an around-the-world tour. He had begun that day in Saigon with the commander of the 250,000 French troops fighting Viet Minh guerrillas. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had assured him that his soldiers could not lose to these natives. He had ended the evening on top of the Caravelle Hotel with a young American consular officer named Edmund Gullion. The sky around the city flashed with the usual nighttime artillery and mortar bombardment by the Viet Minh.
“What have you learned here?” Kennedy asked the diplomat.
“That in 20 years there will be no more colonies”, Gullion had said. “We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. THe home front is lost. The same thing would happen us.”
<end of block quote>
Ask the right person the right question, and you could get the picture pretty fast.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.134
Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned the fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time. There were recent Popular Force outposts. WE had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any. But basically these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets. They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of the U.S. aid. Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam.
But next to one of them was a pill box of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes. The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French. I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France. We drove by several of those. Most were from the 1946─54 war by France to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours. But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam.
In the midsts of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens. I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World war II. They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war. Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones. I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years. When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of that Tran Ngoc Chau had once said to me: “You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese though it took us a thousand years.”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
perforce (George R. R. Martin)
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
• “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally
unchanging. What has happened before will perforce [ of necessity ·
inevitably · unavoidably ] happen again.”
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
What has happened before will perforce happen again,
he said.”;
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows;
Ranee Panjabi, History of Espionage, Memorial University;
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
• “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally
unchanging. What has happened before will perforce [ of necessity ·
inevitably · unavoidably ] happen again.”
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
What has happened before will perforce happen again,
he said.”;
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows;
Ranee Panjabi, History of Espionage, Memorial University;
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
kolmogorov zero one law
____________________________________
● Kolmogorov's zero-one law [ ]
[0or1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%27s_zero%E2%80%93one_law
Kolmogorov's zero-–one law
certain type of event, called a tail event, will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen; that is, the probability of such an event occurring is [either] zero or one. [Not to be mixed up with between zero and one, exclusive.] [By the way, this type of tail event is very much like getting cancer and getting hit by a bus on a Tuesday at 8 o'clock in the morning; from your perspective, you getting or not getting cancer is like being pregnant; either you have it (1) or you don't (0); there is no in between.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot
They were there, even though nobody had seen them before. It's marvelous, a very simple formula explains all these very complicated things. So the goal of science is starting with a mess, and explaining it with a simple formula, a kind of dream of science.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov
On October 2012, Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig completed their book, The bankers' new clothes : what's wrong with banking and what to do about it, © 2013.
I shall quote a line that caught my attention, on page 312, Note 62, “. . . that mortgage borrows often are likely to FAIL Together or NOT at all.”--the full original TEXT, “A major flaw of the entire approach is that it assumes that risks are independent. Cor-relations are neglected, for example, those due to the fact that mortgage borrows often are likely to fail together or not at all.” In other words, this is dominos; tip one over and the cascading effect will cause the rest of the dominos to fall, all for one and one for all.
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/10-reasons-millennials-are-screwed-generation
====================================================
Likely to fail together (1) or not at all (0)
by Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig
----------------------------------------------------
A major flaw of the entire approach is
that it assumes that risks are independent.
Cor-relations are neglected, for example,
those due to the fact that mortgage borrows
often are likely to fail together or not at all.
====================================================
fail together or not at all (BNC)
“ ”
Note 62
p.312
Under Basel III as well as Basel II, there are three “pillars” of banking supervision.
Pillar 1 concerns capital regulation,
pillar 2 the professional quality of banking, and
pillar 3 “market discipline.”
Of these three pillars, pillar 1 is most important because it involves hard rules for capital requirements. Pillar 1 distinguishes assets depending on whether they are held in the “banking book” or the “trading book” of the bank; assets in the banking book are meant to be held until they are repaid, where as assets in the trading book are available for resale at an opportune moment. For each category, banks can choose whether they want to use a “standard approach,” with risk weights specified in the regulations, or, for credit risks, an “internal ratings-based” approach and, for assets in the trading book, a model-based approach to determine the capital required. The zero-risk-weights rule for government debt is given in the regulations for the standard approach to credit risk. A major flaw of the entire approach is that it assumes that risks are independent. Cor-relations are neglected, for example, those due to the fact that mortgage borrows often are likely to fail together or not at all.
(The bankers' new clothes : what's wrong with banking and what to do about it, by Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig, © 2013, p.312)
____________________________________
● Kolmogorov's zero-one law [ ]
[0or1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%27s_zero%E2%80%93one_law
Kolmogorov's zero-–one law
certain type of event, called a tail event, will either almost surely happen or almost surely not happen; that is, the probability of such an event occurring is [either] zero or one. [Not to be mixed up with between zero and one, exclusive.] [By the way, this type of tail event is very much like getting cancer and getting hit by a bus on a Tuesday at 8 o'clock in the morning; from your perspective, you getting or not getting cancer is like being pregnant; either you have it (1) or you don't (0); there is no in between.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot
They were there, even though nobody had seen them before. It's marvelous, a very simple formula explains all these very complicated things. So the goal of science is starting with a mess, and explaining it with a simple formula, a kind of dream of science.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov
On October 2012, Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig completed their book, The bankers' new clothes : what's wrong with banking and what to do about it, © 2013.
I shall quote a line that caught my attention, on page 312, Note 62, “. . . that mortgage borrows often are likely to FAIL Together or NOT at all.”--the full original TEXT, “A major flaw of the entire approach is that it assumes that risks are independent. Cor-relations are neglected, for example, those due to the fact that mortgage borrows often are likely to fail together or not at all.” In other words, this is dominos; tip one over and the cascading effect will cause the rest of the dominos to fall, all for one and one for all.
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/10-reasons-millennials-are-screwed-generation
====================================================
Likely to fail together (1) or not at all (0)
by Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig
----------------------------------------------------
A major flaw of the entire approach is
that it assumes that risks are independent.
Cor-relations are neglected, for example,
those due to the fact that mortgage borrows
often are likely to fail together or not at all.
====================================================
fail together or not at all (BNC)
“ ”
Note 62
p.312
Under Basel III as well as Basel II, there are three “pillars” of banking supervision.
Pillar 1 concerns capital regulation,
pillar 2 the professional quality of banking, and
pillar 3 “market discipline.”
Of these three pillars, pillar 1 is most important because it involves hard rules for capital requirements. Pillar 1 distinguishes assets depending on whether they are held in the “banking book” or the “trading book” of the bank; assets in the banking book are meant to be held until they are repaid, where as assets in the trading book are available for resale at an opportune moment. For each category, banks can choose whether they want to use a “standard approach,” with risk weights specified in the regulations, or, for credit risks, an “internal ratings-based” approach and, for assets in the trading book, a model-based approach to determine the capital required. The zero-risk-weights rule for government debt is given in the regulations for the standard approach to credit risk. A major flaw of the entire approach is that it assumes that risks are independent. Cor-relations are neglected, for example, those due to the fact that mortgage borrows often are likely to fail together or not at all.
(The bankers' new clothes : what's wrong with banking and what to do about it, by Anat Admanti and Martin Hellwig, © 2013, p.312)
____________________________________
London bridge
____________________________________
● Reghuram Rajan, Hyun Song Shin [ ]
[pp.107-108]
"History," [Greenspan] noted, "has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low-risk premiums."
<one paragraph remove>
In hindsight, many have pointed to a paper that International Monetary Fund chief economist Reghuram Rajan presented as a rare moment of clarity at the 2005 conference. Rajan indeed had an astute understanding of the ways in which the financial industry, with misguided compensation policies that encouraged risk-taking, was making the world a more dangerous place: Bankers were paid big bonuses to making money in the short run even if they were betting poorly in the long run. [And] he identified ... one portion of what could go horribly wrong.
It was Hyun Song Shin, then a professor at the London School of Economics, who in response to Rajan's paper most accurately portrayed the state of the global economy.
"I'd like to tell you about the Millennium Bridge in London," he began. In order to celebrate the advent of the year 2000, the British built a stunning new pedestrian bridge across the Thames. Its lateral-suspension design precluded the need for clunky-looking columns, making it a study in engineering elegance.
"The bridge was opened by the queen on a sunny day in June," Shin continued. "The press was there in force, and many thousands of people turned up to savor the occasion. However, within the moments of the bridge's opening, it began to shake violently." The day it opened, the Millennium Bridge was closed. The engineers were initially mystified about what had gone wrong. Of course it would be a problem if a platoon of soldiers marched in lockstep across the bridge, creating sufficiently verticle vibration to produce a swaying effect. The nearby Albert Bridge, built more than a century earlier, even features a sign directing marching soldiers to break step rather than stay together when crossing. But that's not what happened at the Millennium Bridge. "What is the probability that a thousand people walking at random will end up walking exactly in step, and remain in lockstep thereafter?" Shin asked. "It is tempting to say, 'Close to zero.'"
But that's exactly what happened. The bridge's designers had failed to account for how people react to their environment. When the bridge moved slightly under the feet of those opening-day pedestrians, each individual naturally adjusted his or her stance for balance, just a little bit--but at the same time and in the same direction as every other individual. That created enough lateral force to turn a slight movement into a significant one. "In other worlds," said Shin, "the wobble of the bridge feeds on itself. The wobble will continue and get stronger even though the initial shock--say, a small gust of wind--had long passed. . . . Stress testing on the computer that looks only at storms, earthquakes, and heavy loads on the bridge would regard the events on the opening day as a 'perfect storm.' But this is a perfect storm that is guaranteed to come every day."
In financial markets, as on the Millennium Bridge, each individual player--every bank and hedge fund and individual investor--reacts to what is happening around him or her in concert with other individuals. When the ground shifts under the world's investors, they all shift their stance. And then they all shift their stance in the same direction at the same time, it just reinforces the initial movement. Suddenly, the whole system is wobbling violently.
<one paragraph remove>
(Irwin, Neil (2013), The Alchemists, the penguin press, new york, 2013 )
(The Alchemists : three central bankers and a world on fire, Neil Irwin, pp.107-108)
____________________________________
land war in Asia
Korean stalemate
“never again” club
“Never again a land war in Asia”
world war one
____________________________________
David Halberstam, The coldest winter : America and the Korean war, [2007]
p.282
Paul Freeman
Though he became a Chinese language student (and was still fluent enough to interrogate Chinese prisoners during the Korean war), Freeman was very aware that he never really knew China.
He was there, he later reflected, in the last days of empire, and the only Chinese he had known were a handful of very wealthy ones who belonged to the same clubs and enjoyed the same sports ── ── as Westerners.
Some of the clubs did not even allow Chinese members.
He understood that he had no feel for the difficult lives of the great mass of people.
Freeman spent most of World war II becoming an Asia hand. His very pregnant wife had been sent home in the fall of 1940 as tensions mounted and the Japanese army seemed poised to strike deeper into Asia.
China-Burma-India theater
pp.284─285
In his letter there is an early glimmering of what would later be labeled the Never Again Club, those military men who served in Korea and left with a deep-seated belief that American ground forces should never again fight on the mainland of Asia, in part because of the terrible logistical difficulties, but even more because of the inevitable deficit in manpower. These were, it should be noted, his views before the Chinese even entered the war, and he worried constantly in his letters that sooner or later they were going to come in. He was haunted by a sense that the proportions in this war were in some way all wrong, what the other might be able to invest compared to what the United states could safely afford to invest ── in a war that was self-evidently peripheral to American national security interests.
pp.286─287
The commanders of every rifle company in the first two battalions had been lost during this two-week period. In some companies, the official report noted, they had been replaced three to five times. Paul Freeman never really forgot those awful days on the Naktong or the grim choices he had been forced to make, sacrificing some young men so others might live. Some 17 years later, as a four-star making his last tour of Fort Benning before retiring, he discovered that Sergeant Berry Rhoden, formerly Charley company, by then a grizzled master sergeant, was still stationed there. Freeman had always remained close to the men who had served with him in the 23rd in Korea, and he had sought out Rhoden a number of times, just to talk. Now, on this final ceremonial day, he asked Rhoden to accompany him on his tour. There was another general with them that day, a two-star, and Rhoden enjoyed the byplay between them, four-star and two-star, rarified stuff for an NCO to witness. At one point, Freeman turned to his colleague. “I'd like to introduce you to a member of your command, Sergeant Berry Rhoden. He's an old comrade of mine. Berry is a survivor of a terrible moment when I made the hardest decision I ever had to make as an Army officer. I had to sacrifice his entire company for the good of my regiment and all the other units in the Pusan perimeter. I had to buy time for the other units to form into a blocking force. And they brought the time we needed. It was a terrible, terrible moment and a brutal decision. It was the hardest decision I ever made. Almost no one from his unit survived. You take good care of him, hear.” It was one more reminder to Rhoden that none of them had been able to forget that moment.
p.579
Thus, each lost foxhole was a new Chinese position, allowing ever more Chinese to come up the hill and making the other foxholes ever more vulnerable for the Americans and easier for the Chinese to attack.
Cletis Inmon, McGee's runner, thought he had never seen so many Chinese at that night ── even though it was dark, you could see them fairly clearly, because they were so close. It was, he decided, like an endless line of soldiers that started some place back in the middle of China, maybe a thousand miles away, whatever the distance was, marching all the way to Korea, one long line emptying out right in that little creek bed in front of them.
( The coldest winter : America in the Korean war / David Halberstam.──1st ed.; 1. korean war, 1950─1953──united states., DS 919.H35 2007, 951.904'240973──dc22, [2007], )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
pp.62─63
It was popularly understood that the legacy of the Korean stalemate was a “never again” club in the u.s. army, meaning “Never again a land war in Asia”. I knew from my earlier work on war planning that the real meaning of that motto was “Never again a land war with China without nuclear weapons.” The files I read in McNaughton's office made it clear that lesson was still doctrine. And not only (though mainly) among the military. Secretary of state Dean Rusk (who had been assistant secretary for the Far east during the first two years of the Korean war) could not have agreed more. In a conference with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon in mid-April 1964, he had cited the formular in so many words: “We are not going to take on the masses of Red China with our limited manpower in a conventional war.”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
https://thediplomat.com/2015/08/dont-forget-land-wars-in-asia/
https://www.ausa.org/news/us-aims-avoid-fighting-land-war-asia
https://www.proquest.com/docview/2090477040
Ground wars in Asia favored the ever more numerous home teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
https://www.ausa.org/news/us-aims-avoid-fighting-land-war-asia
https://www.proquest.com/docview/2090477040
Ground wars in Asia favored the ever more numerous home teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
special clearances (higher than top secret)
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
pp.237─239
“Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe 15 or 20 of them, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all ── so much! incredible! ── suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by the presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't ... and all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time ── not too long, but a matter of two or three years ── you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. THere is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that take a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues ... and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to access what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
It was a speech I had thought through before, one I'd wished someone had once given me, and I'd long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of “real” executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I'd long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island,
THey became incapable of human speech and couldn't help one another to find their way home.
Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew that it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet.
─‘’“”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.43
It is a common place that “you can't keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy”, that “no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times”. These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keep secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.
This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders. (see chapter 3.)
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.39
NoDis, referring to an office or offices specified, corresponded to eyes only for an individual or a set of individuals, supposed to be seen “only by the eyes of” the addressees named. The point was to control and direct who knew ── and shouldn't know ── in an elaborate hierarchy of responsibility and secrecy.
I was never a person named in the list of addressees of an eyes only message, nor, for that matter, was John McNaughton usually on the list. When I saw that stamp or heading, I was looking at a copy of a document that in principle, according to the designator, wasn't supposed to be copied at all, or to be seen by me or my boss. Nor was International Security Affairs or its assistant secretary (let alone his special assistant) very often among the addressess of a NoDis State dispatch. Usually no one in the Pentagon, even the secretary, was listed for receiving one of these relatively infrequent messages, which tended to be addressed to the secretary of state or the president. But there it was, in front of me, from the message center. Obviously, NoDis and eyes only were, in practice, relative terms, intended (one had to assume that the senders knew this, from their own experience) to cut the number of people who saw a particular secret or top secret message from thousands or hundreds down to scores or even dozens (apart from secretaries or couriers or special assistants).
To get below even that, senders sometimes put rather desperate warnings in the heading, in capitals, “Literally eyes only of the secretary” or “the President”. I was aware of this of course because I was reading it, and I hadn't stolen it, nor had I made the copy that I was reading.
pp.39─40
I gave him the cable number and mentioned that it was from a new series of weekly reports the ambassador was sending personally. It had a special slug, or code word, to designate the series, limiting the distribution, presumably very severely. But I was getting my own copy, as was McNaughton. I told Forrestal these were very interesting, and he should make sure he got on the list.
p.40
(The only sense I could make subsequently of the sensitivity on this was that the code word list must have been devised at Ambassador Maxwell Taylor's request ── for some personal reason that I never learned ── to allow him to communicate to his two bosses in private, specifically keeping the information from his former White House colleague Forrestal.)
p.40
Meanwhile he paid a continuing price for my error. This particular set of messages was no longer sent to his office. Only one copy of these came to the Pentagon, to Secretary McNamara's office. McNaughton had to go there to read the copies, on a clipboard from which he couldn't remove them.
That's how you learn.
pp.79─81
McNaughton kept next to his desk a bookstand with a row of his most frequently referred to and most sensitive directives, cables, estimates, and memoranda compiled into separate binders and three-ring notebooks. It was on rollers, so that when he left late each evening it could be easily moved from his desk into the closet-size, floor-to-ceiling safe that lined the outer wall of his room, along with the library shelves of classified documents stored there. Each morning before he arrived, his military aide unlocked the safe, which had a top secret combination lock, and wheeled his stand of personal reading materials over to his desk, so that he could reach a reference file easily from his chair.
I had access to the materials on this shelf, as I did to anything in the piles of paper on John's desk. But since he wanted instant access to these when he was at his desk, I rarely, if ever, took one of these binders out of his office into my cubbyhole a few steps away. I had copies of most of these same materials in my own safe. But if I needed to refer to something on his personal shelf, I would walk into his office ── if he didn't have a red light showing in the row of lights above his door ── pull it out, and look at it, standing next to his desk, while he worked away. His power of concentration was such that this didn't bother him, if it was carried out quietly and without my saying anything to him. Even so, I generally did that when he wasn't in the office. Since I often worked later than he did, I had the combination to his closet safe, so I could wheel the stand back into it when I was ready to leave the office. As far as I knew, the only others who had that combination, apart from John, were his military aides.
One day in the late spring his chief military aide abruptly left the office. I never heard an explanation for his apparent firing, but the first sign was that his assistant, the junior military aide, gave me a new combination to McNaughton's office safe. It had been changed that morning, the day of the colonel's departure. Sometime before that, though I hadn't made any connection at the time, John had pointed out to me a large binder at the lefthand end of his personal shelf that he asked me not to look in. The label on it was something to the effect of “Vietnam, McNaughton eyes only”. I could use anything else on the stand or in his files, but these were really for his eyes only. He told me it held papers that he had been directed not to share with anyone else at all, and in this case that included me.
p.81
For a number of such nights, I didn't think of looking into the binder that was out of bounds. But John was asking me not to look at high-level policy papers, on Vietnam, in 1965, never to try to find out what was really going on among the “principals”, what they were considering and proposing, what they were writing to one another, even when, it seemed, I could do so without anyone's knowing.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Theodore Modis., Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future, 1992.
pp.37-38
p.37
Critics of S-curves have always raised the question of uncertainties as the most serious argument against forecasts of this kind.
p.37
Obviously the more good-quality measurements available, the more reliable the determination of the final ceiling. But I would not dismiss the method for fear of making a mistake.
p.37
Alain Debecker and I carried out a systematic study of the uncertainties to be expected as a function of the number of data points, their measurement errors, and how much of the S-curve they cover.
p.37
We did this in the physics tradition through a computer program simulating “historical” data along S-curves smeared with random deviations, and covering a variety of conditions. The subsequent fits aimed to recover the original S-curve.
p.37
We left the computer running over the weekend.
pp.37-38
On Monday morning we had piles of printout containing over forty thousand fits.
p.38
The results were published,12 and a summary of them is given in Appendix B, but the rule of thumb is as follows:
If the measurements cover about half of the life cycle of the growth process in question and the error per point is not bigger than 10 percent, nine times out of ten the final niche capacity will turn out to be less than 20 percent away from the forecasted one.
p.38
The results of our study were both demystifying and reassuring. The predictive power of S-curves is neither magical nor worthless.
p.50
1340
This date [1340] can be considered as the time when the exploring process originated, the moment when Europe's need to explore the West was born. For the best agreement between curve and data, the early-missing-data parameter has to take a value around fifteen (15).
pp.50-51
The conclusion is that there must have been about fifteen (15) attempts before Columbus that failed while trying to explore the West, the first one dating back to around 1340.
p.51
This kind of backcasting ── if somewhat daring ── is not different from the usual forecasting approach. We are dealing with a pattern similar to that of the growing vocabulary of an infant if we only look at the data pattern upside down and let time run backward. The uncertainties on the number fifteen (15) can be estimated (see Appendix B) to be plus or minus three.
(Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future / Theodore Modis., 1. forecasting., 2. creation (literary, artistic, etc.)., 3. science and civilization., CB 158.M63, 303.49--dc20, 1992, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
pp.471─472
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theories of rational choice under uncertainty: the contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern.” Senior honors thesis, Harvard university, 1952.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Classic and current notions of ‘measurable utility’”. Economic journal 64:255 (September 1954), 528─56.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theory of the reluctant duelist”. American economic review 45:5 (December 1956), 910─23.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The theory and practice of blackmail”. In Bargaining : formal theories of negotiation, ed. Oran R. Young. Urbana: university of illinois press, 1959, 1971.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The crude analysis of strategic choice”. American economic review 6:2 (May 1961), 472─78.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Risk, ambiguity, and the savage axioms”. Quarterly journal of economics 75:4 (november 1961), 643─69.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Vietnam diary──notes from the journal of a young American in Saigon.” Reporter (January 13, 1966).
Ellsberg, Daniel. “”
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Laos : what NIxon is up to.” New york review of books (March 11, 1971). Reprint in Ellsberg, Papers on the war, 259─74.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The quagmire myth and the stalemate machine.” Public policy (spring 1971). revised version in Ellsberg, Papers on the wars, 42─135.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Interview by Walter Cronkite. CBS news special report, June 23, 1971. For transcript, see: www.ellsberg.net.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the war. New york: simon and schuster, 1972.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Risk, ambiguity and decision. New york: Garland, 2001. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard university, 1962.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
pp.237─239
“Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe 15 or 20 of them, and I've known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all ── so much! incredible! ── suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by the presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't ... and all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time ── not too long, but a matter of two or three years ── you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. THere is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that take a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues ... and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to access what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
It was a speech I had thought through before, one I'd wished someone had once given me, and I'd long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of “real” executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I'd long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island,
THey became incapable of human speech and couldn't help one another to find their way home.
Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew that it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet.
─‘’“”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.43
It is a common place that “you can't keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy”, that “no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times”. These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keep secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.
This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders. (see chapter 3.)
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.39
NoDis, referring to an office or offices specified, corresponded to eyes only for an individual or a set of individuals, supposed to be seen “only by the eyes of” the addressees named. The point was to control and direct who knew ── and shouldn't know ── in an elaborate hierarchy of responsibility and secrecy.
I was never a person named in the list of addressees of an eyes only message, nor, for that matter, was John McNaughton usually on the list. When I saw that stamp or heading, I was looking at a copy of a document that in principle, according to the designator, wasn't supposed to be copied at all, or to be seen by me or my boss. Nor was International Security Affairs or its assistant secretary (let alone his special assistant) very often among the addressess of a NoDis State dispatch. Usually no one in the Pentagon, even the secretary, was listed for receiving one of these relatively infrequent messages, which tended to be addressed to the secretary of state or the president. But there it was, in front of me, from the message center. Obviously, NoDis and eyes only were, in practice, relative terms, intended (one had to assume that the senders knew this, from their own experience) to cut the number of people who saw a particular secret or top secret message from thousands or hundreds down to scores or even dozens (apart from secretaries or couriers or special assistants).
To get below even that, senders sometimes put rather desperate warnings in the heading, in capitals, “Literally eyes only of the secretary” or “the President”. I was aware of this of course because I was reading it, and I hadn't stolen it, nor had I made the copy that I was reading.
pp.39─40
I gave him the cable number and mentioned that it was from a new series of weekly reports the ambassador was sending personally. It had a special slug, or code word, to designate the series, limiting the distribution, presumably very severely. But I was getting my own copy, as was McNaughton. I told Forrestal these were very interesting, and he should make sure he got on the list.
p.40
(The only sense I could make subsequently of the sensitivity on this was that the code word list must have been devised at Ambassador Maxwell Taylor's request ── for some personal reason that I never learned ── to allow him to communicate to his two bosses in private, specifically keeping the information from his former White House colleague Forrestal.)
p.40
Meanwhile he paid a continuing price for my error. This particular set of messages was no longer sent to his office. Only one copy of these came to the Pentagon, to Secretary McNamara's office. McNaughton had to go there to read the copies, on a clipboard from which he couldn't remove them.
That's how you learn.
pp.79─81
McNaughton kept next to his desk a bookstand with a row of his most frequently referred to and most sensitive directives, cables, estimates, and memoranda compiled into separate binders and three-ring notebooks. It was on rollers, so that when he left late each evening it could be easily moved from his desk into the closet-size, floor-to-ceiling safe that lined the outer wall of his room, along with the library shelves of classified documents stored there. Each morning before he arrived, his military aide unlocked the safe, which had a top secret combination lock, and wheeled his stand of personal reading materials over to his desk, so that he could reach a reference file easily from his chair.
I had access to the materials on this shelf, as I did to anything in the piles of paper on John's desk. But since he wanted instant access to these when he was at his desk, I rarely, if ever, took one of these binders out of his office into my cubbyhole a few steps away. I had copies of most of these same materials in my own safe. But if I needed to refer to something on his personal shelf, I would walk into his office ── if he didn't have a red light showing in the row of lights above his door ── pull it out, and look at it, standing next to his desk, while he worked away. His power of concentration was such that this didn't bother him, if it was carried out quietly and without my saying anything to him. Even so, I generally did that when he wasn't in the office. Since I often worked later than he did, I had the combination to his closet safe, so I could wheel the stand back into it when I was ready to leave the office. As far as I knew, the only others who had that combination, apart from John, were his military aides.
One day in the late spring his chief military aide abruptly left the office. I never heard an explanation for his apparent firing, but the first sign was that his assistant, the junior military aide, gave me a new combination to McNaughton's office safe. It had been changed that morning, the day of the colonel's departure. Sometime before that, though I hadn't made any connection at the time, John had pointed out to me a large binder at the lefthand end of his personal shelf that he asked me not to look in. The label on it was something to the effect of “Vietnam, McNaughton eyes only”. I could use anything else on the stand or in his files, but these were really for his eyes only. He told me it held papers that he had been directed not to share with anyone else at all, and in this case that included me.
p.81
For a number of such nights, I didn't think of looking into the binder that was out of bounds. But John was asking me not to look at high-level policy papers, on Vietnam, in 1965, never to try to find out what was really going on among the “principals”, what they were considering and proposing, what they were writing to one another, even when, it seemed, I could do so without anyone's knowing.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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Theodore Modis., Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future, 1992.
pp.37-38
p.37
Critics of S-curves have always raised the question of uncertainties as the most serious argument against forecasts of this kind.
p.37
Obviously the more good-quality measurements available, the more reliable the determination of the final ceiling. But I would not dismiss the method for fear of making a mistake.
p.37
Alain Debecker and I carried out a systematic study of the uncertainties to be expected as a function of the number of data points, their measurement errors, and how much of the S-curve they cover.
p.37
We did this in the physics tradition through a computer program simulating “historical” data along S-curves smeared with random deviations, and covering a variety of conditions. The subsequent fits aimed to recover the original S-curve.
p.37
We left the computer running over the weekend.
pp.37-38
On Monday morning we had piles of printout containing over forty thousand fits.
p.38
The results were published,12 and a summary of them is given in Appendix B, but the rule of thumb is as follows:
If the measurements cover about half of the life cycle of the growth process in question and the error per point is not bigger than 10 percent, nine times out of ten the final niche capacity will turn out to be less than 20 percent away from the forecasted one.
p.38
The results of our study were both demystifying and reassuring. The predictive power of S-curves is neither magical nor worthless.
p.50
1340
This date [1340] can be considered as the time when the exploring process originated, the moment when Europe's need to explore the West was born. For the best agreement between curve and data, the early-missing-data parameter has to take a value around fifteen (15).
pp.50-51
The conclusion is that there must have been about fifteen (15) attempts before Columbus that failed while trying to explore the West, the first one dating back to around 1340.
p.51
This kind of backcasting ── if somewhat daring ── is not different from the usual forecasting approach. We are dealing with a pattern similar to that of the growing vocabulary of an infant if we only look at the data pattern upside down and let time run backward. The uncertainties on the number fifteen (15) can be estimated (see Appendix B) to be plus or minus three.
(Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future / Theodore Modis., 1. forecasting., 2. creation (literary, artistic, etc.)., 3. science and civilization., CB 158.M63, 303.49--dc20, 1992, )
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Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
pp.471─472
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theories of rational choice under uncertainty: the contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern.” Senior honors thesis, Harvard university, 1952.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Classic and current notions of ‘measurable utility’”. Economic journal 64:255 (September 1954), 528─56.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theory of the reluctant duelist”. American economic review 45:5 (December 1956), 910─23.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The theory and practice of blackmail”. In Bargaining : formal theories of negotiation, ed. Oran R. Young. Urbana: university of illinois press, 1959, 1971.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The crude analysis of strategic choice”. American economic review 6:2 (May 1961), 472─78.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Risk, ambiguity, and the savage axioms”. Quarterly journal of economics 75:4 (november 1961), 643─69.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Vietnam diary──notes from the journal of a young American in Saigon.” Reporter (January 13, 1966).
Ellsberg, Daniel. “”
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Laos : what NIxon is up to.” New york review of books (March 11, 1971). Reprint in Ellsberg, Papers on the war, 259─74.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The quagmire myth and the stalemate machine.” Public policy (spring 1971). revised version in Ellsberg, Papers on the wars, 42─135.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Interview by Walter Cronkite. CBS news special report, June 23, 1971. For transcript, see: www.ellsberg.net.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the war. New york: simon and schuster, 1972.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Risk, ambiguity and decision. New york: Garland, 2001. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard university, 1962.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
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