I’m taking a COIN class here on The Hill, which didn’t really focus on airpower, but the more strategic level–a lot of “get to know the culture!” and “stop killing good guys!” Nothing I haven’t read on Abu Muquwama, although we did read some good books–and I got to write a fun paper that I may be fleshing out more later.

The final project for this class was a debate over this resolution: Airpower plays and will continue to play primarily a supporting role in counterinsurgency, due to the nature of insurgencies.

I was the affirmative. I wish I had seen this article before the debate finished up. Colin Clark has a very interesting piece on how aerial surveillance provided the slam dunk when it came to confirming the Cuban Missile Crisis–but it was really an alley oop. It was HUMINT resources on the ground that gathered the information, gave the spy planes a place to look, and provided the bedrock of the intelligence.

No, Cuba wasn’t COIN, but it was just one more example of how the true effort is–and must be–joint.

So says this blue-suiter, anyway.

John Dvorak just posted about the fragility of online social networks. I think he missed the point.

He claims that “there is no such thing as a real community online.” There are only “pretend” communities.

I suppose it depends on your definition of community. Communities come together on the Internet all the time–see Wikimedia’s various projects, among others. People still meet, build relationships, and gain synergistic value from one another. I’m IMing a friend of mine right now that I met from an online community.

That specific community is now defunct, and perhaps this is Dvorak’s larger point–that individual social networks value is transitory at best. But he says himself that these things are generational and evolutionary–once there are too many people on Twitter, the early adopters will have moved on to the next big thing.

Someone in the comments pointed out that real communities are just as fragile. Yogi Berra once said it something like: “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” This is true for electronic or meat networking locations–but the network abides. The location is fragile… the network is simply (and wonderfully) mobile.

In my Information Operations class today, someone started talking about net-centricity and the way it flattens command and control (although he didn’t quite call it that, more’s the pity–he took a fairly high-altitude view of the thing and didn’t even specifically reference Future Combat Systems or Land Warrior).

It got me thinking, though: could I cobble together a Do It Yourself Land Warrior system, like John Robb has started thinking about?

Answer: Yes.

Step 1: Get your team on Helio.
Helio’s Buddy Beacon service serves as the backbone for our DIY Land Warrior kit. A GPS receiver allows you to broadcast your position to track the position of up to 25 friends–five fire teams? Zoomed in far enough, this offers a major part of Land Warrior’s functionality, identification of friendly forces.

Step 2: Tweet and tag.
Sending up “digital chemical flares” is another advantage of the Land Warrior system. Geotagging Twitter tweets is one way to do this. Represented on a map using Twitter and Google Maps APIs, it might look something like this. Add photos to it to share intelligence, and you’ve got this (map example).

Is it that… simple? Well, no, not quite. This DIY system would be neither secure nor fault-proof. The Army system adds a Dead Reckoning module for when GPS just isn’t good enough. But you could track friends, share intel on enemies “instantly,” and, with your phone’s camera, peek around corners. Those seem to me to be the high points of the Land Warrior System, especially for someone operating in the States, where GPS coverage is generally pretty good.

We have entered a new age. This is the first example of Information Warfare being waged at the national level. An entire nation was shut down (okay, it was a small nation, but still) by a team of politically-minded hackers from somewhere inside Russia. There were no ground troop movements in this war. There was no air bombardment. There was only a… dare I say it? A cyberterrorism incident. Regardless of whether it was state-sponsored or not, this is a turning page.

I heard of this first from my Estonian friend A.T. about twelve hours before it hit ABC and BBC. She said I was getting the news three weeks late. In case you don’t want to read ABC’s decent synopsis, here’s a transcript of her super-brief rundown:

A.T.: Soviets cleared the German control here and substituted it for their own
A.T.: We just see it as another invasion
A.T.: Russians consider themselves to have freed us….So it’s a conflict of understandings
A.T.: And our new government promised to remove the statue
A.T.: So one day they put a yard around it, dug the thing up and took it to a memorial…thing…slightly less idiotic than the middle of the city
WMX: Good deal, except the politically active young Russian asshats got all up in arms about it?
A.T.: Yup
A.T.: Millions in damage
A.T.: Russians feel insulted
A.T.: So now we’ve suddenly pissed off 25% of the country. The rest of the 75% are bloody pleased.

There ya go, from the horse’s mouth. Whatever it was, at least it was an isolated incident (isolated being several weeks and an entire country). We (we being cadets, mostly) mock the addition of “cyberspace” to the Air Force’s mission statement, and Navy’s “cyberwarriors” are the brunt of quite a few snickers, but it looks like they might actually be needed, and not too far in the future. I have my doubts about whether a federally controlled, militaristic bureaucracy can handle a horde of fast-thinking foreign blackhats, but we should be ready. Maybe if they’re equipped like a Special Forces team. “These things we do… that others may play Solitaire.”

I’d like to leave you with a quote from a decently prescient movie:

Trackposted at Diary of the Mad Pigeon.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I can understand the need for secrecy regarding military operations. Not everyone needs to know everything and supposedly the Tamil Tigers are using programs like Google Earth to plot out attack plans for their new air force. I have to agree with Threat Level’s Mr. Singel, though, when he says that the government can’t keep a lid on information forever. “Can’t stop the signal,” as some might say. And here’s the real question: do you even want to?

So what if we did this: put a moratorium on the satellite footage that goes out of these “sensitive areas.” Make it six months or so. The tactical situation will be unrecognizable in six months and there’s a good chance the operational will be too. You can have all the resolution you want of those areas, it’ll just be six months old. The government can’t keep the lid on ALL the information ALL the time, but it might be able to keep SOME of it for SOME of the time.

It might require our operational plans to be a little more flexible, changing H.Q. locations periodically for instance. How big is that price really? Besides, if we ever get into another semi-conventional war, we won’t just have to worry about our citizens’ satellites. We’ll have to worry about the other guys’, too.

Look here for an interesting overview on the Tamil Air Tigers and the way they serve as a guerrilla “think tank.”

More power to them. A recon bird that can spend two days in the air at 30k feet? A unmanned cargo plane with a 30 ton payload? Rock on. When can we get us some of that?

They’ll probably be vexed with the same problems our UAVs are: lack of maneuverability and slow response time. Anyone remember the Predator getting run over by a passenger jet? Then again, with a cargo plane, does it really matter?

DANGER ROOM’s David Hambling just posted an overview of what exactly EFP’s are. Since I promised, here’s the link. Look at it closely- this is the sort of thing our troops are facing every day.

Mr. Noah Schactman over at WIRED’s Danger Room blog (awesome stuff, I recommend you check it out) posted a few interesting facts about China. We’ve all heard about their recent satellite killer which spread hazardous debris for many orbital paths, but did you know they may have blinded a US bird earlier?

Combine that with their recent upsize in defense budgets and the J10, a single-seat single engine fighter comparable to our F-16 that debuted in December, and you’ve got a rapidly modernizing air and space force. Good thing our F-22s are practicing dissimilar tactics over the Sea of Japan (Thanks again Danger Room!).

Flashpoint: Taiwan Strait. The oscillating tensions between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are at a peak. Keep on eye on the news, and if you see something, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Link to WIRED Blogs: Danger Room

UPDATE: This just in, caught from a Reuters report on Yahoo!. Talk about tensions at a peak: On Sunday, the ROC’s president discussed declaring independence as a Taiwanese nation and changing their name, two things specifically prohibited under the status quo, Four Noes and One Without. Then, PRC Foreign Minister says that anyone advocating independence will “be a criminal in history.” This game’s ante just went up, and everyone with a military mind should be paying attention.